Which of the following retains the information it's storing when the system power is turned off?

October is a time to celebrate ghouls, goblins, and creepy things that go bump in the night. And with popular shows like The Walking Dead, who could forget about everyone's favorite brain eaters, zombies?

As you know, a zombie is an undead person who came back from the grave to make existence a nightmare for the living. And in tech, there are different kinds of horrifying zombies in the workplace: zombie botnets, zombie VMs, and the ones we'll focus on in this article ... decrepit technologies that are frightening for IT professionals to support.

The undead technologies below have passed their end-of-life date, but continue to trudge along well after they were supposed to be dead and gone. And sometimes these ancient technologies actually do die out, but later claw their way back into the world of the living. No matter the case, zombie tech can be a scary sight to behold for anyone working in IT.

8 Undead technologies that still haunt IT

End of life operating systems like Windows XP

According to IT pro anecdotes and Spiceworks data, there are a lot of really old operating systems installations still haunting corporate networks. In June of 2017, Spiceworks research found that 42% of companies were using Windows XP, a spooky security danger in the face of out-of-support OSes with unpatchable vulnerabilities.

And if you think XP is old, some IT pros are still supporting tech from the 1980s like MS-DOS. IT pro Inger Cierniak shared this terrible tale of undead tech: "Our phone system is only running as the result of some sort of sorcery. There's wiring in the closet and MS-DOS software running on Windows 2000. When you dial an extension, you usually get the person you called. Don't try to transfer a call. I'll walk over to your office and just use your phone. It's easier that way."

Source: Pixabay

Dot matrix printers

These screeching, banshee-like print devices aren't just slowly decaying in museums, cobwebbed corners of server rooms, and in your grandparents' attic. Manufacturers still produce dot matrix printers today, as some companies still use them to print to non-standard forms and carbon contact copy paper. And who knows when you may want to print giant banners that span many pages of perforated paper.

As you might guess, supporting dot matrix printers can be a nightmare for IT, as the devices are often older and more temperamental than college kids, they don't work well with modern operating systems, and they can require ports that don't exist on newer computers. Source: Dale Mahalko [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Legacy hardware and applications

In a tech community like Spiceworks, you'll hear many scary stories of ancient hardware hanging on by a thread way past its pull date because it still works. Whether the zombie tech is a nuclear weapons system that uses floppy disks, the equally important bowling-alley software powered by 486 desktops, or point-of-sale systems circa the 1990s ... Legacy hardware is everywhere.

And when we say that some systems are so old they belong in a museum, we mean it. SpiceHead Greg Strickland once recounted a story about how some plants rely on hardware so ancient that the only replacement parts are in the Smithsonian. Good luck with that the next time something breaks down.

Ancient programming languages like COBOL and FORTRAN

COBOL can trace its roots back to the 1950s, and computer science pioneers such as Grace Hopper. But despite being old enough to collect Social Security checks, this zombie computer language has not yet retired.

In fact, in 2017, the Associated Press estimated that $3 trillion in daily commerce was affected by computer systems that run COBOL. Some might say it still works, so it's not a big deal, but the problem is that the developers that still know how to support the dying language are retiring, or taking their knowledge to the grave.

Just how dependent is the world on COBOL? SpiceHead Darko Resnik offered these words of wisdom: "Banking, insurance, and many other industries relied on mainframes running programs written in COBOL. Many still do. If the programs that ran the financial sector crashed it would (be) quite a disaster."

Pagers/Beepers

Remember in the 1990s when having a wireless pager was super cool? Before cellphones became popular, it was a status symbol to sport a beeper ... or a sign that you were either a doctor or selling illicit items on the black market.

But now that we have smartphones, why are pagers still around in a world where text messaging is common? According to several IT pros, it all comes down to reliability and signal strength, in that you can still receive pages in areas that cellphones won't function.

According to IT pro, Ken Helms, a beeper "can stay on 24/7 on a single battery that doesn't need to be replaced that often. Try explaining a dead cellphone when you lose a major customer when you violated a 30-minute SLA ... and their 300 VMs crash and they can't reach you ... paging systems were built with maximum redundancy because first responders use it so much. So, in a natural disaster, power outage, or significant event, you'll still get a page."

Source: By Jochem Pluim [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Dial-up modems

If you think that dial-up modems died out sometime in the early 2000s, think again. In 2015, an estimated 2 million people still paid for AOL dial-up, mostly because of its very low cost, or because they live in areas without broadband. And for IT pros that support branch offices or remote users in rural areas, dial-up might still be a reality.

Despite dial-up being so 1990s, here in Spiceworks we still see conversations about dial-up ISPs in 2017 ... presumably to support legacy systems. For example, some companies still use dial-up modems to keep old-school phone servers operational.

Thankfully, with better connectivity options becoming more common, this seems to be one undead technology that's on it's way out for real. Fun fact: did you know you can get still get free NetZero accounts (zero dollars for up to 10 hours a month!), and Earthlink offers dial-up service for a mere $9.95 per month?

Source: Wilton Ramon de Carvalho Machado [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Fax machines

We might have covered fax machines in previous articles about terrifying tech, but these aging artifacts are such a thorn in IT pros' sides (some call them the bane of their existence) that we have to mention them twice. In a recent Spiceworks poll, nearly 90% of IT pros said that they still have to support some form of fax machine, 62% of those being physical fax devices ... even in the age of the internet.

Whether because of dubious security claims, the desire for a physical paper trail, HIPAA regulations, users being resistant to change, or lack of affordable alternatives, there are many reasons why fax machines won't go away any time soon.

Source: Spiceworks

Bonus: Mechanical keyboards This next technology isn't necessarily terrible to support, but it serves as a prime example of how a technology can die out completely, only to come back decades later due to nostalgia or because it truly is superior under some circumstances. Mechanical keyboards, those clickity-clackity input devices that came with the original IBM PCs in the 1980s, are back with a vengance, thanks to gamers and folks that don't mind shelling out hundreds of dollars for the satisfying feel of keys that click loudly beneath your fingers. But instead of sporting the slightly yellow, off-beige hue that all computers perhiperals used to have, the new crop of mechanical keyboards are sleek, customizable, and backlit by LEDs ... and they use USB or PS/2 (another legacy technology) instead of those old 5-pin ports!

The only people who mechanical keyboards might be terrifying to are the people who sit next to someone who uses one ... they are not quiet by any means. I can see the support tickets complaining about them now, "My neighbor's keyboard is making a CLICK CLACK CLICK CLACK sound!!!" Were you terrified by the undead technologies in our list? Do you have to keep the zombie tech at bay in your organization? Let us know in the comments! Also, read more about zombie IT in our previous article: 5 terrifyingly undead technologies