The Artifact / Real Life

Businesses

• The 7-Eleven chain of convenience stores, originally known as Tote'm Stores, acquired its current name in 1946 in honor of its new opening hours — 7 AM to 11 PM, which was unprecedented for its time. By the mid-1960s, all of them were open 24 hours a day.
• In the Middle Ages, barbers performed surgery in addition to cutting hair and shaving. One popular procedure was bloodletting, where the barber would simply slice the patient's wrists as they grabbed onto a bandaged pole to encourage blood flow and hope that whatever ailment they had would bleed out along with it. That's what the red and white stripes of the barber's pole◊ they used to advertise themselves with represent.
• One of Otakon's mascot is Crabby-chan the Chesapeake Blue Crab, the state crustacean of Maryland, where the convention was held. However, when the convention moved to Washington D.C., Crabby-chan still stayed.
• Western Union started out as a telegraphing company that did money orders on the side. For a long time it was a money order company that did telegrams on the side. However, they have since gotten rid of telegrams as nobody who would not be asking for the Prussian consulate in Siam uses telegrams anymore.
  • For that matter, the second T in AT&T stood for Telegraph. The T is still there, but it doesn't stand for anything anymore.
  • American Express is so named because it was an express mail and parcel company. It became a financial services company only in 1917.
• The IT giant Symantec has three artifacts:
  • The very name "Symantec". The modern-day Symantec was originally named C&E Software and acquired the original Symantec (est. 1982) in 1984 after the latter could not use its artificial intelligence technologies in any actual software.
  • The name of their most popular business line, the Norton antivirus. It cames from Peter Norton Computing, which they bought from its namesake in 1990. Peter Norton Computing no longer exists and Peter Norton no longer has anything to do with Norton products or Symantec. (In fact, until 2001, this◊ pink-shirt, arms-crossed image of the namesake was also an artifact.)
  • Their check mark sign. It actually used to be the iconic logo of a company called Verisign, which most recognised product was their SSL certificates^note this is the technology that forbids third parties from stealing sensible data such as credit card numbers online, via a method known as "encryption". (The logo has a distinct V-shape and pixelized edges which hawk back to Verisign's encription origins.) In 2010, they bought this business from Verisign, along with its iconic logo. (Making "Verisign" an Artifact Title^note Go to the "Companies" folder for more on them, as they no longer "sign" certificates.) They would expand use of the check mark sign to every product line of the company. And, in 2018, they were effectively forced to sell the SSL certificate business to competitors DigiCert as it turned out in 2015 that they mis-issued SSL certificates for various domain names without the owners' knowledge, and both Google and Mozilla had downgraded trust in Symantec certificates^note keep in mind the DigiNotar case, which broke out in 2011, which represented a very small part of SSL certificates, as well as the fact that Symantec represented 1/3 of the market and was grandfathered (since the Verisign era) in the SSL root certificate as trusted ever since Netscape invented SSL and incorporated it into their browser!. DigiCert then proceded to revoke all Symantec certificates, replacing it with new DigiCert ones, and Verisign/Symantec being taken out of the SSL root certificate infrastructure. So, the check mark sign (and the Verisign name) better represented a business which does not even exist anymore!

City Infrastructure

• Interstate 35 splits into Interstates 35W and 35E in both Dallas-Fort Worth and Minneapolis-St. Paul. This is because forked routes with letter suffixes were formerly allowed when the Interstate Highway System was first created, but were later abolished by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials in The '70s due to confusion over numbering. All of the other "split" Interstates were renumbered, but the two splits of Interstate 35 stayed because, first, unlike all the other lettered routes, the two 35W/35E pairings reform into the "main" route, and second, since Interstate 35 happens to go both of the biggest "twin cities" metro areas in the U.S., renumbering either pairing would mean that only one city between the two would get the "main" route. (However, Interstate 69 was allowed to split into Interstates 69W, 69E, and 69C when construction began in Texas in The New '10s, and Interstate 480N in Cleveland was kept because it is a very short unsigned route.)
• There is a grand total of one segment of the Interstate Highway System where the interstate turns into a surface road and not a four lane freeway: Interstate 70 in Breezewood, Pennsylvania, where the freeway temporarily turns into an at-grade four-lane boulevard along US Highway 30 before doubling back and crossing under itself to join the Pennsylvania Turnpike/Interstate 76. The reason for this oddity in the Interstate Highway System is that back during its genesis in the 1950s/60s, creating a direct intersection with I-70 and I-76/the turnpike was not financially feasible without forcing drivers to have to take the toll road instead of giving them a free alternative route to take (due to the only other available major road, US 30, being about a mile past the turnpike), leading to the very unusual intersection with US 30 and the turnpike being built as an alternative. Although revamping the intersection so that I-70 and the turnpike directly meet has become more feasible in the years since, by then various businesses such as restaurants, gas stations, and hotels had sprung up along the short stretch of I-70/US 30, turning the area into a bonafide rest stop, whose owners worried about losing their business should the intersection be reconstructed, while the local government in Bedford County by then didn't really see any point in doing so. Thus the strange intersection remains to this day.
• "Vegas Vic," the neon cowboy fixture that is often seen in media set in Las Vegas, has long outlived the casino he was built to promote. When the Pioneer Club closed in 1995, dismantling Vic was unthinkable because by that point he had become an unofficial mascot of the city. As a result, arrangements were made for him to remain lit up on Fremont Street even during the three years his building sat vacant (it's now a souvenir shop).
• By far the most iconic landmark of South San Francisco, California^note an actual city of its own, not the southern part of SF proper is the hill with the inscription "South San Francisco - The Industrial City". The sign was built in 1929 during an industrial boom. Today, SSF's economic focus is more on technology (much like the rest of the SF Bay Area) than heavy industry, but the sign remains today as a government-registered monument.
• The logo of Nederlandse Spoorwegen, the national railway company of The Netherlands, is inspired by the iconic British Rail logo from a few years prior, depicting parallel lines with arrows suggesting the direction of travel. Both logos imply that trains on the lines will be travelling on the left, which is true in Britain but not in The Netherlands. The same thing can be seen in Spain with the 1970's Renfe logo◊, which saw successive redesigns until 2005.
• Pittsburgh has numerous outdoor staircases going up its famously-hilly neighborhoods. During the city's industrial days, the factories and steel mills were built on flat ground near the rivers while people's homes were up in the hills, and in the years before cars and public transit were commonplace, the most reliable way to get to work was to simply walk. The city steps made that commute safer and easier. Nowadays, the mills are long gone, plus the majority of Pittsburghers have cars and/or take public transit to get around. While several city steps are still standing, they are in varying states of disrepair and are mostly "use at your own risk" (especially in the winter) since the city no longer considers their maintenance a priority.
• The Oslo tram system still uses the older SL-79 models, which date back to the early 80's, in addition to the newer SL-95 ones introduced in the late 90's and the even newer SL-18 ones from The New '20s, despite them not being wheelchair-accessible due to their raised floor (in stark contrast to the rest of the city's public transport, which is designed to be as accessible as possible save for some similarly old infrastructure on metro and rail lines) and originally being planned to be retired with the rollout of the SL-95's. This is due to design flaws with the 95 rendering them unusable on certain sections of the tram grid, in addition to being very unreliable in general, forcing the city to continue using the 79 on lines that use these tracks. As of 2024, they are finally being retired after 42 years in service due to them having reached the absolute end of their lifespan and the rollout of the SL-18 model.

Food and Drink

• According to most accounts, Angostura bitters originally got their trademark badly-fitting label because they once had to start selling their product in smaller bottles as a cost-cutting measure, and didn't want to waste their remaining labels that were too big for the bottles. Since then, of course, they easily could have started printing smaller labels if they wanted to—but they don't, since (as noted on The Other Wiki) the oversized label is now the most distinctive thing about the bottle. Tellingly, Angostura now sells bottles in multiple sizes, but all sizes still come with labels that are just a little bit too big for the bottle.
• Banana flavoring is based on the Gros Michel banana. However, in the 1950s, the Cavendish replaced the Gros Michel as the main banana worldwide after a Panama disease epidemic. The taste of banana flavored foods hasn't changed, even though most people have never even tried a Gros Michel (which is why banana flavored foods "don't taste like bananas").
• Apples and pumpkins/squash are the traditional fruits of autumn. Every September, grocery stores roll out with apple cider and pumpkin-spiced everything to the eager masses. Before the Industrial Revolution, these fruits were only harvested and sold in the fall, so the association makes sense, but today, thanks to regions with year-round growing seasons and refrigerated storage/shipping, one can buy apples and squash whenever they want. Still, the habit stuck and these fruits continue to be associated with fall and fall holidays. Granted, in temperate climates, these fruits and their products (especially cider) are a lot cheaper in the fall when they can be locally sourced, but they're available all year.
• The Mc10:35, an unofficial McDonald's sandwich, which consists of a McMuffin wedged inside a double-cheeseburger. Mickey-Dee's used to only serve breakfast until 11 AM, and stared preparing beef patties at around 10:30 to be ready for the lunch rush. Ergo, if you got there at around 10:35, you could order a breakfast sandwich AND a hamburger, and combine the two.
• The UK's Milky Way Magic Stars, bags of small star-shaped aerated chocolates, originally launched with one of the six mascot characters on each packet (said mascots being chocolate stars themselves with simple personalities such as "Pop Star", "Bright Star", etc). The edible stars themselves also all had one of six simplistic faces engraved into them, which matched up to the six characters. The packaging for this product has long since abandoned the mascots, with the illustration of the chocolate stars on the front showing no faces at all, but the actual chocolates inside the packet continue to bear the faces of the six mascot characters as of 2022.
• Coca-Cola has sold its beverages with the label "Coca-Cola Classic" at various points in the 21st century, and continues to sell drinks with the label "Original Taste"—even though it's no longer necessary to differentiate it from "New Coke", which hasn't been sold in decades.

Language and Symbols

• The reason that spelling in English seems so irregular and arbitrary (especially compared to other languages like German or Spanish) is because generally speaking the current English orthography reflects the language's phonology from the Renaissance; spelling was regularized in the middle of a change in pronunciation known as the Great Vowel Shift. While this makes learning how to spell words rather more difficult, it can sometimes preserve the etymology of the words, making it easier to figure out what a written word actually means when comparing it to other languages or related forms. However, many English spelling quirks have no etymological basis; some are now even known to be founded upon mistaken etymologies, such as the silent s in island (erroneously indicating a purported descent from Latin insula). Even so, any organized English spelling reform would face too much resistance to be worth the trouble, as the existing spelling system is now so ingrained that few people can seriously contemplate the idea of reform. As much an authority and Memetic Badass as Theodore Roosevelt tried to reform English spelling and failed.
  • Additionally, English was originally closer in structure to other Germanic languages, such as German and Icelandic. The influx of Norman French after the Conquest is popularly thought to have had a radical effect on the language, though, linguists generally consider the grammatical shift to be a result of internal changes, observing that many other Germanic languages show the same shift, despite having no French influence, and that the Normans were a small group. (The same cannot be said about changes in English vocabulary; that really was heavily influenced by Norman French.) On the other other hand, however, these shifts are more extensive in English than they are in the other Germanic languages, and modern linguists do attribute this to language contact—but not with Norman French. Rather, the au courant theory is that the transformation of English from a highly synthetic language to a highly analytic one is the result of contact with Old Norse—the language of the (mostly Danish and Norwegian) vikings who attacked and then settled in England in the 8th through 10th centuries. While Old Norse was fairly closely related to and just as synthetic as Old English, its inflectional endings were almost completely different from the English ones. An Old English-speaker couldn't really understand an Old Norse-speaker if they just spoke their languages as they would among their own people, though because the languages were related they'd catch tantalizing snippets. But over time, the Danes/Norwegians and English realized they could communicate well with each other by dropping most of the inflectional grammar, leaving them with their common Germanic vocabulary. The grammatical meaning conveyed by inflection in Old Norse and classical Old English would instead be conveyed by word order and prepositions. However, a few patterns in inflections still preserve traces of English previously being more of a synthetic language; for instance forming the possessive with 's derives from the genitive case ending of strong nouns -es (learners of German will recognize the concept, as it is one of the archaisms mentioned). Significantly, this inflection is one shared by Old Norse and its descendants, today's Scandinavian/North Germanic languages, like, er, Danish and Norwegian.
  • Making it even more of a wonderful mess is that English will assimilate words, grammatical quirks, and spelling variants from any language and that between the British Empire and the Americans, English speakers have invaded pretty much every corner of the world at some time or another. American English, though, is more likely to assimilate things like Yiddish because of odd historical quirks.
    • American English also has some spelling changes codified by Webster (eg, colour to color, defence to defense) when he was writing his dictionary. While Brits sometimes claim that it was meant to differentiate American English from British English, it was actually an attempt by Webster to simplify and regularize the spelling of some words by removing many silent letters and to bring them more in line with their etymological origins. Most of the "changes" actually already existed in the real world, but Webster codified them in his dictionary and they became widely adopted in America. Interestingly some changes were also adopted in Britain and some were rejected on both sides of the Atlantic. Other Americanisms (like "thru") are more recent and have yet to gain universal acceptance as anything but "lazy writing" or informal language.
    • Not to mention many trends of British English that theoretically should have been removed by Webster's English Dictionary, yet which are still quite common in American English regardless. In particular, while the "-ogue" ending was theoretically shortened to "-og," there are several words, i.e. "epilogue," "dialogue," "synagogue," etc. which are usually still spelled with the "-ogue" ending regardless of which country you reside in. Similarly, American English generally replaces the "-ise" ending with "-ize" if a word is spoken like the latter instead of "-ice," yet there are several words like "advertise," "circumcise," "supervise," etc. which maintain their original "-ise" endings even in American English.
  • Generally, spoken language changes more quickly than written language. Most, if not all, written languages have at least some minor artifacts such as silent letters that were once pronounced. French has an entire time form that cannot be distinguished in most spoken dialects but is still alive and well in writing.
  • In Spanish there are some words, that only make sense if you understand grammatical concepts that were common in Latin and have since vanished in all Romance languages. For example the words "with me" and "with you" are "conmigo" and "contigo" respectively, which preserves the Ablative case that would have to be used for the same construction in Latin. Similarly, Adverbs are formed by the female form of the adjective +mente, which makes little sense in Spanish but in Latin could be translated as "with an [adjective] mind"; again using the Ablative. No Romance language uses the Ablative today and even the cases Dative and Accusative that are still present to some degree are rarely ever called that by Spanish native speakers.
• Some use of the Irish language falls under this. In Ireland, it isn't spoken as a first language outside the rural Gaeltacht areas in various parts of the country or in Irish-speaking schools known as Gaelscoileanna - and the majority of the population can't speak it fluently. Yet signs and train announcements show the place names in Irish first because of tradition. It's also still required learning in school and for some professions. While there is one example of a pretty much "dead" language being revived (Hebrew) into a flourishing national language, it is a matter of some debate what purpose besides tradition and patriotism Irish serves, especially since almost all Irish people speak a rather widespread other language.
• A lot of American Sign Language is based on outdated things. Some signs have changed over the years but many are still in their original format. For example "female" emulates a bonnet string, "male" emulates tipping a hat, and "toast" emulates the pre-toaster way of toasting bread with a fork over a fire.
• September, October, November, and December were originally the seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth months on the Roman calendar. Fittingly, their names are all derived from the Latin words for their respective numbers. Eventually, January and February were added to the end of the year, which still began with March. (Until the introduction of January and February, the period of 60ish days from the end of December to the beginning of March was not assigned to any month.) However, at some point people began to mark the new year at the beginning of January rather than the beginning of March; eventually—sometime in the 2nd or 3rd century BCE—the political calendar followed suit, starting the terms of elected officials (particularly consuls) at the start of January rather than March. This was particularly useful for consuls and to a lesser extent praetors, since they held imperium (military authority) and could use the extra two months to prepare before campaign season in the spring. Nonetheless, the months all retained their names, despite their names and placements no longer lining up.
• Representing men's and women's restrooms with a stick figure in pants and one in a dress, respectively. Nowadays both sexes usually wear pants, though gowns still overwhelmingly reign supreme for women at formal events. Of course some women just prefer skirts in general for reasons of their own, but this is far from common today.
• When a traffic signal is depicted on a sign or a computer app, a graphic of a classic, pagoda-like 4-way traffic signal is often used — think of the curvy visors sticking out of both sides. Very few traffic lights of this type are in use anymore (most signal manufacturers discontinued them by 1970), and many of those that do remain in service are probably for an "old town" retro appearance. Today's traffic lights are single-face units, usually mounted separately over each lane.
• A common pictogram used for airport baggage claims is a traditional wide suitcase with a small handle on top. Almost all luggage available today is the kind that's narrower and taller, with a large retractable handle used to pull it on wheels.
• In the automotive world, a common pictogram used for fuel gauges and such is a classic analog gas station pump with the nozzle nested on the side. Around 1980, most gas stations began installing pumps with hoses directly on the front of the unit, and today the side hoses are quite rare. Even the one or two older side-nozzle pumps at some stations used for dispensing kerosene are digital models that aren't quite the same.
• Why does the American Lung Association use a Cross of Lorraine in its logo? Because the Association was originally founded in 1904 to fight tuberculosis, and the Cross had gained international use as a symbol for "the war on tuberculosis", based on French physician Gilbert Sersiron likening the struggle to France's efforts to regain territory in Lorraine that had been annexed by Germany, which made the Cross a popular French patriotic symbol.
• The now-ubiquitous "peace" symbol was originally designed in the late 1950s as a symbol of the anti-nuclear weapons movement: it was formed from the semaphore symbols for "N" and "D", which stand for "nuclear disarmament". When it eventually caught on as a more broad anti-war symbol in the 1960s, the design was rendered largely meaningless, but it has nonetheless endured as one of the most recognizable symbols in the world.

Landmarks

• Madison Square Garden, the world-famous indoor arena in New York City, is nowhere near the actual Madison Square and hasn't been since the second Garden (as of writing we are on the fourth) was demolished in 1925.

Politics

• Most monarchies, especially in Europe, became this once the countries became democratic. Nowadays their royal families are just figureheads whose only job is to spread goodwill in their country's name. Nonetheless, kings and queens are crowned and the births of new members and the order of succession are still discussed in popular culture. An Artifact within monarchies is the act of naming the eldest male child the heir apparent even if he has an older sister (such as King Felipe of Spain being the youngest of three), and many European countries have changed their succession laws to reflect modern gender equality. For instance, when William and Kate of the British Royal Family were expecting their first child, had it been a girl, she would have been the first female heir apparent in British history to be in line for the throne ahead of any younger brothers.
• Until 1946, Hungary was officially a Kingdom with a monarchical state structure, despite not having actually had a king since 1918. The last King, Charles IV, had been forced out at the end of WWI, and the Allies were unwilling to accept his return. However, Hungarian politics was still dominated by monarchists who refused to accept a republic, so the throne simply lay vacant for 28 years until its final abolition. Hungary's de facto head of state during this time, Admiral Miklos Horthy, styled himself "Regent of Hungary".
• Many countries and territories around the world that were once a part of the British Empire still contain the Union Jack on their flags. Examples include Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, and the administrative divisions of Hawaii, Manitoba, and Ontario, among others (including UK overseas territories). Although many formerly British countries and territories have removed the Union Jack from their flags, the aforementioned countries and administrative divisions chose to keep it on theirs, and are in no hurry to remove them. Also, while most of these countries and territories recognize the British monarch as their head of state, Fiji has been a republic since 1987, while Hawaii was never actually ruled by the UK,^note Lord George Paulet of the Royal Navy ruled Hawaii for five months in 1843, though the UK did not authorize the move, making it an illegal occupation. and only got the Union Jack as a sign of the close relationship between the former Hawaiian Kingdom and the Royal Navy.
• You've probably heard of First World countries and Third World countries. Ever wonder where all the Second World countries are? By the way, you probably think that being a dirt-poor shithole is the criteria for being a Third World country. Not necessarily. During the Cold War, First World countries were allied with the capitalist United States (UK, Canada, Japan, etc.), Second World countries were allied with the communist Soviet Union (China, Cuba, North Korea, etc.), and Third World countries were neutral (most of Africa, Latin America, South Asia...as well as many parts of Europe). As you can see, the entire system is outdated what with the Cold War being long over. In the current political realm, the terms mean precisely nothing. The colloquial definition of "Third World" is just the result of most (not all, but most) neutral countries happening to be dirt poor, which is largely still the case (e.g. India, by far the largest member, has a GDP per capita at PPP of $7,300, compared to $53,000 in the "First World" and $18,000 for the global average).^note World Bank numbers for 2021, First World corresponsing with countries classed as High Income. It's especially hilarious when people suggest the U.S. is becoming a Third World country. That would require the U.S. to be neutral from itself. This is why the phrases "First World" and "Third World" has fallen away in favor of "Developed/Developing World/Country".
  • Related to this is the Non-Aligned Movement, a loose cooperation of states in this third category. It still exists, but struggles to find relevance. It's also long since been an Artifact Title as the group includes many very partisan countries like Iran and Venezuela, and even outright treaty allies like Thailand (still considered party to the 1954 Manila Pact).
  • The original context of Third World derived from the colonial era. There was the Old World (Europe) and the New World (the Americas), and then there was everything else—or, more to the point, everything non-Western.
  • The term "Fourth World" was occasionally used to describe countries deeply mired in poverty, as distinguished from "Third World" countries that were showing signs of economic progress. It never really caught on, however - barring its rather different meaning for DC Comics fans.
• In the United States, a common argument given in favor of abolishing the Electoral College is that the College itself is largely this, being an outdated relic of a bygone era of American government when popular sovereignty was still considered a radical idea. In a nutshell: it was initially proposed at the Constitutional Convention as a concession to the Founding Fathers who opposed Presidential elections entirely, and instead favored letting Congress appoint the President.^note  This is why the Constitution stipulates that every state gets exactly as many electoral votes as it has representatives in Congress, why the District of Columbia originally didn't get electoral votes (it doesn't have representatives in Congress, since it isn't a state), and why D.C. now gets three electoral votes (three is the minimum number of Congressional representatives that a state can have). This was in effect a parliamentary system, with the President responsible to Congress, especially given its main architect's proposal that impeachment require simple majorities in both houses (rather than a simple majority in the House and 2/3 in the Senate) and could be invoked for any reason (instead of requiring some kind of criminal or quasi-criminal offense). (Of course, nobody thought of it that way at the time, chiefly because the contrasting form of popular government—presidentialism—was invented by the actual Constitution that came out of the Convention of 1787.) When the College was first created, every state's electors had the authority to vote independently from the people and cast their votes for whomever they wanted, essentially allowing the electors to check the power of the voters by vetoing candidates whom they deemed unsuitable for the Presidency. But not only has the College never actually voted independently from the people, all but two US states have since adopted a "winner-take-all" system requiring electors to cast their votes for the candidate who wins the majority of the popular vote in their state, effectively recognizing that the President should be chosen by the people rather than a body of appointed representatives (which the College was originally supposed to prevent). Today, the Electoral College mostly just exists as a rubber stamp for the votes of the people, but one with a distribution of votes that still makes it possible for candidates to become President despite the majority of voters not voting for them.
• Many apparent bizarre, useless, or overly-specific laws are the result of patches that have since become obsolete thanks to changing standards, but were never removed from the books because nobody could be bothered to do so. For instance, Japan's pornography/sex work industries have been legally required to censor their output (e.g., blurring out genitals) for many decades. Hardly anyone these days seriously think such laws are necessary or even effective at their stated goal (what's allowed to be uncensored more than suffices), but actually trying to change them would be a waste of time at best, political suicide at worst. As a result, people just censor the absolute bare minimum of what's legally required and law enforcement puts little effort into enforcing the rule because nobody really cares.

Religion

• Believe it or not, the Exsultet prayer sung in the Catholic Church every Easter Vigil included at the end a prayer for the Holy Roman Emperor up until 1955, by which time the post had lain vacant for some 149 years. Due to the political realities, of course, the prayer was not actually said after 1806, due to the lack of a Holy Roman Emperor to pray for, but the prayer remained in the official rubrics until then.
• Kol Nidre, the famed chant that opens the traditional Yom Kippur service, is this in several ways. For starters, it's mainly in Aramaic, which has a roughly similar relationship to Hebrew as Old English does to modern English. And it's basically a legal text rather than a religious one, asking for the annulment of vows. It includes references to konam and konas, which were apparently two types of vows that have otherwise been lost to history (no one's quite sure what they specifically were used for). It was originally adopted for Rosh Hashana, but got moved to Yom Kippur. Several prominent rabbis criticized it, but it stayed in the Yom Kippur liturgy mainly because congregants felt that the plaintive, eerie melody was perfect to set the mood for a "day of atonement".

Science

• A lot of terminology in science was named based on incomplete information. But even though we know more now, changing the terminology at this late point would be a monumental task, so we just keep using the not-quite-right words with this being very common in sciences as Astronomy.
  • It makes sense to envisage the flow of electric charge from positive to negative. Unfortunately, because the charges were named before we knew anything about the particles that carry them, they were named "backwards", and electrons flow from negative to positive. Made fun of in this XKCD comic.
  • The two main groups of dinosaurs are called Saurischia ("lizard-hipped") and Ornithischia ("bird-hipped"). They were named before we knew that birds are dinosaurs. Unfortunately, it turns out that birds are lizard-hipped dinosaurs. Oh well, too late now.
  • The very word 'dinosaur' is this. When the first fossils to be identified as dinosaurs were discovered, such as Iguanodon◊, they were thought to be giant lizards, giving them a Greek name meaning 'terrible lizard.' Over decades of discovery of new bones and taxonomy rapidly changing, we now know dinosaurs are not closely related to lizards, but were part of a distinct family called the archosaurs (aside from dinosaurs and birds, the next closest surviving relative is crocodiles). Despite this fact, -saur is still used for classification for dinosaurs and other reptiles not closely related to lizards, and variants of '-saurus' routinely see use for the names of new dinosaurs.
  • The Oviraptor (literally "egg thief"), a genus of dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous period, got its name from an early theory that it was a scavenger that primarily subsisted on other dinosaurs' eggs (the first fossilized specimen was found near a nest, leading paleontologists to conclude that it died trying to steal the eggs inside it). This theory has been discredited for decades (it turns out that the eggs were the creature's own eggs, and it was protecting them), but the name has stuck.
  • The above phenomenon has also hit many individual species, as changing a creature's scientific name is generally not done, and a law causes the existing name to take priority over the new name proposed, preventing renaming. Just ask Basilosaurus ('king lizard', actually a vaguely serpentine whale), Megarachne ('great spider', actually a sea scorpion with a chubby body), and Anomalocaris ('strange shrimp', actually part of a long-extinct arthropod line with mouthparts vaguely resembling shrimp).
  • The terms "nova" and "supernova" came at a time when they were believed to represent new stars in the sky ("nova" meaning "new"). Nowadays, we know that not only is this not true (to the contrary, stars at the end of their lives cause them), but the two have very little in common other than that they're both stellar phenomena resulting in massive bursts of energy.^note A Type 1a supernova has more in common with novas than other supernovas. That type of supernova is a white dwarf star exploding.
  • Even if it has been known for centuries that the "seas" of The Moon are actually large extensions covered by solidified lava, astronomers still refer to them using the old, Latin-based, nomenclature (ie, "Oceanus Procellarum"^note Ocean of Storms in Latin, "Mare Nectaris"^note Sea of Nectar or "Lacus Mortis"^note  Lake of Death) developed when they were thought to be large bodies of water, up to naming equivalent farside features the same way (as in "Mare Ingenii"^note "Sea of Ingenuity"). Likewise, originally the way to mark the cardinal points of the Moon was based on the way it's seen from Earth^note North up, south down, East left, and West right. At least in the northern hemisphere , but once astronauts walked on it and "selenites" exist even if temporarily East and West were reversed to show the position of both from the perspective of someone in the Moon's surface… leaving unchanged the old designation of a prominent lunar feature, the Mare Orientale^note "Eastern Sea", despite it being now on the Moon's west side.
  • The concept of the Celestial sphere. While stars are currently known to be at very different distances of Earth and not studded to the inner part of an sphere, the concept is still used out of practice and because there's not difference at all for celestial navigation.
  • Planetary nebulae have nothing to do with planets, being glowing shells of gases released by dying stars instead. However, they're known as such following the nomenclature used by the astronomers who discovered them back in the 18th century, to whom they resembled faint and fading planets.
• Carbon 14 decay dates objects to "years before present" (YBP). The "present" in this means 1950 AD, due to atomic testing in the following decade screwing up natural atmospheric radiation. Needless to say, with every new year the "present" of carbon 14 becomes further in the past and there will come a moment in the future when it becomes useless as a dating method.
• Vestigial organs are organs that were once useful in a species's ancestors, but are almost entirely useless in their descendants thanks to evolution. One example is the "arrector pili" muscles that raise hairs in mammals to help with air circulation when it gets cold, which in humans still function and produce "goose bumps", but our hairs are so fine and sparse that there's no actual use in raising them.
  • Some organisms have traits or behaviors that are superfluous, but not yet vestigial. Pronghorns can run up to 60 miles per hour – far faster than necessary to escape from a wolf or cougar, but a must-have when chased by the now-extinct American cheetah. xkcd illustrates another example through this poignant comic.
  • Many evolutionary biologists believe that "wisdom teeth" were originally propagated through natural selection in a time when humans generally lost most of their teeth before reaching middle age, giving an evolutionary advantage to people who grew an additional set of molars later in life. Since the advent of dentistry, losing teeth has become much less common than it once was, but most humans still grow those additional molars—even though they've become more of a painful nuisance than a useful adaptation.
• Many Dachshunds, and general dog, enthusiasts believe that the breed suffers from this. It's officially a Hound dog but for all purposes it's actually a Terrier. It came into being from Hound dogs who were bred to go underground, so it continued to be called a Hound long after it stopped hunting like other Hound dogs.
• The "back to back" dog sleeping position is this for any dog that's no longer a puppy. Puppies sleep cuddled up to one another (hence the sleeping position's other name "the cuddle bug") because they need some help regulating body heat, which becomes less necessary as they mature. However, many of them still sleep in this position even as adults out of habit, which doubly means that the dog views its human family members as fellow dogs.
• Many science museum exhibits that depict the Solar System will still include Pluto despite Pluto being downgraded to a dwarf planet in 2006.

Technology

Technology Marches On has created quite a few:

• The legal profession in general is notorious for being all but Luddite in its technological adoption. Fax machines are still common in courts and law offices around the world for the transmission of documents—but only unofficially, they'd prefer you send the papers by courier. Lawyers in many countries also need to be very adept at the fine art of the voicemail, because attorneys still expect you to actually leave a message. Email makes some legal professionals twitchy, and you get the feeling that some in the legal profession would prefer we ditched computers altogether; indeed, some courts require or all but require that submissions be in Courier or another typewriter font (New Jersey Supreme Court and Appellate Division, we're looking at you). Some of this makes sense (for instance, a judge's order is only valid after she signs it and the order is stamped "Filed", but inputting signatures into computers is a massive PITA, so you need to rely on paper), but a lot of it is simple institutional inertia.
  • The legal insistence on sending signed documents via fax instead of (say) scanning the signed document and emailing it has become even more absurd since most fax machines used in offices these days are multifunction stations. The "fax machine" is a networked scanner/printer, sent to another "fax machine" that is also a networked scanner/printer, meaning there is literally no difference between "faxing" something and scanning and emailing it.
• Speaking of fax machines, in Japan they are still very much used in many businesses. Japanese business culture jumped on fax technology in a major way in the 80s, and its use was woven into their business processes heavily. A combination of a culture of bureaucratic inflexibility and an aging population that dislikes change, it will probably hang around in heavy use well into the next few decades.
• Even though many major businesses and establishments have accepted credit cards, if you're a visitor to Japan it's still a good idea to carry cash. Some businesses doesn't take credit cards or a service takes one of the many e-money card systems (like Suica, originally meant to enable cashless mass transit payments) in addition to cash, but haven't adopted a major credit card into their system. Again, an aging population resistant to change is a major component of this, as well as a culturally different philosophy on credit and digital transactions.
• Dot matrix printers were still until recently in use at car rentals years after they became an artifact everywhere else, mainly due to retaining the ability to print onto carbon copy paper. They are finally being phased out as rental car companies have mostly eliminated the need to have a carbon copy of the renter's signature, but you may see them still in some smaller locations.
• Some government and business computer systems still use an MS/DOS interface (complete with monochrome screens!) because the system infrastructure/programs used were too expensive/not worth the hassle to replace/upgrade. In government in particular, it is often difficult to implement change, as even if the bureaucracy is fully on board (surprisingly more common than you'd expect), it's often hard to convince the bureaucracy's political masters that a given update is worth taxpayer money to implement. In both government and business, old systems are finally slowly dying out as the systems age and newer options and processes that can't be placed in the older systems become needed. In some security critical applications, it is also (arguably) safer to run "outdated" technology rather than update. You really don't want your nuclear silo to be connected to the Internet, so E-Mail is right out. What about pneumatic tube messengers?
• Anytime you see a pay phone or police call box on the highway. The proliferation of cell phones ceased the need of one (even if you choose not to carry one or your battery dies, there will always be someone nearby with one you can use in an emergency). They tend to still be in some rural places (though they may not have any service).
• A video rental store still in business. RedBox, Netflix and internet streaming have put all the big chains (such as BlockBuster) out of business. A few mom n' pop stores still operate in more rural areas, particularly if internet services available in those localities don't yet allow for fast and reliable streaming. The handful remaining in urban areas tend to focus on material unavailable elsewhere. Some films just never crossed the Digital Divide or got streaming releases — whether they were actively censored, impossible to restore to a semblance of HD, tangled in rights disputes, or simply not judged commercially viable. These stores literally Keep Circulating the Tapes.
• The hard disk activity indicator light on computers has had, at best, situational practical use since the mid-90s. The light was needed during a time when computers didn't have automated shutdown procedures, and as a result you needed to know if the hard disk was being used or not to know if you could safely hit the power button on your computer. While you could generally guess that an idle command prompt was not tying up the disk at all, it never hurt to be safe. Beginning with Windows 95, the shutdown function was included in the operating system, so even the old style AT style computers that lacked self power off capabilities could still bring the computer to a state where the user was guaranteed no disk activity (this is the purpose the "It's now safe to turn off your computer" screen served), rendering the main use of the disk activity light obsolete. Nowadays, people only tend to check it when they suspect their computer has softlocked, but otherwise most wouldn't be able to tell what purpose it serves.
• The Intel x86 CPU architecture carries a baggage of over 40 years of history, most of which it has to keep for backwards compatibility, even when the instructions or behavior have been long obsolete or even detrimental to performance. As an example, in the original 8086 all arithmetic instructions affected all flags, with the exception of the "inc" and "dec" instructions which left the carry flag unchanged. This made it much easier to do arithmetic on integers larger than 16 bits in a loop (because a "dec" of the loop counter register wouldn't affect the carry flag, which is needed for the further steps in the arithmetic operation). Back in the days of the 8086, and even up to about the 80386 and 80486, this was fine. However, in modern x86 and x86-64 processor designs this behavior of "inc" and "dec" make them less efficient, causing a so-called "partial register flag stall". Intel (and AMD) cannot change this behavior because while most programs don't rely on this behavior of those two instructions, any program that does would break.
  • In 2023, Intel seriously considered the removal of x86's 16-bit and 32-bit operating modes which have been the ISA's artifact since the late 80s. To this day, every x86 processor boots in the so-called 16-bit "Real Mode", which the CPU acts like an 8086. Part of booting up the computer is to get it out of this mode. But before anyone freaks out that doing this may wreck backwards compatibility with their applications, the 64-bit mode can run 16-bit or 32-bit applications just fine, it's only the operating systems and firmware that has to worry about this. ^note The reason why 64-bit versions of Windows can't run 16-bit applications is because Windows lacks the hooks to translate 16-bit system calls into 64-bit ones. 64-bit Linux can run 16-bit Windows applications just fine through WINE
• Referring to a movie as a "film" is becoming this, considering that since the Turn of the Millennium, fewer and fewer theatres have utilized actual physical film reels. The term will probably stick around for a very long time, though, since "movie" sounds too slangy for many people, "motion picture" or even "picture" just sounds elitist, and "photoplay" sounds too archaic.
• The term "rewind", in the context of reversing a piece of media to an earlier point in its runtime, originally came about due to film and videotape having to be physically re-wound to accomplish this. The shift to optical drives and digital media eliminated this mechanical action from the reversing process, but the word "rewind" stuck and is still in regular use today. Similarly, many people will still say that they are "taping" a show, even though it is being recorded to a PVR or cloud drive.
• The QWERTY keyboard layout (along with its French and German counterparts AZERTY and QWERTZ) originally served the purpose of making typewriter jams less common by spreading common letter combinations around, thus making it less likely that the type would jam due to adjacent letters being pressed too close in succession. This is no longer relevant, but the keyboard layout stuck.
  • Dvorak spread the myth that this layout was devised to slow down typists in an attempt to popularize his own keyboard layout, which he claimed was faster. Dvorak's own studies claimed to prove this, but as it turns out they were Blatant Lies specifically designed to try and sell his keyboard format; modern studies indicate that many keyboard layouts, including QWERTY and Dvorak, result in indistinguishable typing speeds. There are many keyboard layouts which are significantly worse than them, but even some randomized keyboard formats work just as well.
  • Related to typewriters is the rows of keyboards being staggered, especially when many typing guides emphasize assigning each finger to a column of keys yet each column is not at a right angle to each row. Again, this is due to typewriter design: each key on a typewriter operates one of many different hammers, and staggering the rows ensures that these straight hammers can reach the paper. Naturally, this isn't an issue on computer keyboards, and some keyboard makers design keyboards with ortholinear keys, so that the user's fingers need only up or down (for keys not in the innermost columns, anyway) for keys not in the home position.
• To "dial" a phone number was a more accurate description when the action required turning a physical dial instead of pushing buttons.
  • The act of "hanging up" is rarely done these days, thanks to landline phones being wireless and cell phones becoming common. Nowadays, people end a call by pressing a button, but everyone still says they're "hanging up" due to everyone being familiar with the term to mean the call is ending.
• DVDs are the same shape and size as CDs, but their boxes are long rectangles, not (near) squares. This is because as people switched from VHS to DVD they were still putting the DVDs on the shelves that were designed for VHS tapes.
  • This followed for PC games and most video game consoles as well. In the case of PC Games the DVD style cases replaced the big boxes. Not coincidentally, full manuals and Feelies being included along with the disk died out around the same time.
    • Consoles have a zig-zagging tradition: Sega had CD games first on cardboard boxes (Sega CD), then "tall CD cases" (late SCD, Saturn) or "thin Genesis\Mega Drive boxes" (Saturn), and finally regular jewel (Japanese Saturn games, plus the Dreamcast, which ran on special 1 GB-sized disks). Sony had both the tall cases and jewel cases with CDs (PS1), and then regular DVD (PS2) and Blu-Ray (PS3, PS4) boxes. And except for disk-based consoles, Nintendo had the media getting smaller (SNES -> N64; Game Boy -> GBA -> DS) but the box still retaining the same shape and comparable internal size.
    • Some DVDs (particularly music ones) started using the CD Jewel Boxes and Super Jewel Boxes packaging for a while, but this was not widespread as people kept confusing them for CDs. This practice has continued with the release of Led Zeppelin's Celebration Day on Blu-Ray which comes in a blue tinted Super Jewel Box.
  • And it continues on with Blu-Ray apparently. The boxes aren't as long, rectangular, and are smaller than that of DVDs, but they are still fairly noticeably rectangular.
  • Similarly, CDs, when released, came in a "long box" which held the jewel case. This allowed them to use shelves that had originally been intended for taller LP records. The long box was ultimately regarded as environmentally wasteful and discarded around 1993. At the same time, most stores selling music CDs started instead using reusable plastic security covers that elevated the jewel case to the same height.
• The logo for the Secure Digital memory card standard was recycled from the logo for the Super Density Disc, which was one of the precursors to the now-ubiquitous DVD optical disc format.
• The "save" icon for most computer programs is represented by a floppy disk, despite the fact that the floppy disk is very much obsolete and computers haven't even been sold with floppy drives for years.
• The universal symbol for a phone, used on everything from public signs to the Phone app on smartphones, is that of a phone developed in the 70s and 80s, despite the fact that these are becoming increasingly rare with the proliferation of cell phones that look nothing like them. Even landlines are usually cordless phones that don't resemble those handles. Add that that the "hang loose" gesture for phone\call is meant to resemble the old telephones...
• Some cars are still produced with a cigarette lighter built inside, despite the fact that most people do not smoke as much as they did decades ago and current smokers would have their own lighter that works much better than a car lighter (and the practice of smoking in a car falling out of favor). There are many devices that plug into the car lighter, such as a charger for a cell phone or MP3 player.
  • Even this may finally be going the way of the dodo. With most if not all modern devices using a USB cord for charging, many newer cars have USB slots along with car lighter slots. Eventually, the traditional car lighter plug may be phased out entirely.
  • Or not: while most people think of charging small electronic devices such as phones via USB, the lighter plug is also used to power larger devices such as emergency lights, air compressors, coolers (and heaters), video players, and can be used in reverse to charge the vehicle's battery. Instead of going away, many vehicles such as pickup trucks not only still have the traditional cigarette lighter, they have multiple ports (usually with a flip-cover). The lighter part may go (though they still exist as an aftermarket accessory for anybody who still wants one), but the power port is likely to remain.
• Now that most computers use LCD screens, which are less susceptible to having images "burned in" to them than CRT monitors, screen savers aren't really necessary. However, most people still use them because they look pretty.
• Software internals tend to reflect the times in which they were designed. For example, in the Unix operating systems, terminal-related operations typically include the word "tty", short for "teletype", despite teletype terminals being obsolete for decades. Modern Unix-like systems use terminal emulators, which use a standard keyboard and mouse to emulate obsolete models of physical terminals, such as the VT100. Another reminder of the old days is the SIGHUP signal (HUP is short for "hangup"); once indicating a literal hangup on the terminal's phone line, it now typically means a network disconnection.
• The C Programming language has a few keywords that aren't used and may have been defined either for compatibility reasons or because of their necessity at the time.
  • A really obscure one is the "auto" keyword from the C programming language, which is meant to denote the variable is local to a scope-block. It exists only because it was needed in C's predecessor B and officially serves no purpose whatsoever since this is the default behavior when declaring variables. C++ has since repurposed it. ^note There's actually an unofficial use for it if you want to scan the call stack, but since this involves multiple kinds of implementation- and undefined-behaviour already, it doesn't count.
  • Another keyword in C that is never really used is "register". This would tell the compiler to limit the size of the variable to the native size of the CPU's register to optimize data access. Compilers are good at figuring this out on their own now.
  • Depending on how old the source file is, you'll run into the data types "short" or "long." These were meant to be used in conjunction with "int", such as "short int" or "long int," to specify how many bits the data type uses. However, you could also use only "short" or only "long." This fell out of use because how many bits these data types actually use is implementation dependent, and so the C99 standard introduced a more concise way of expressing data types that mean exactly what they say.
  • "Goto" is an unconditional jump to some location. It's almost never used and many programmers may bash you in the head if you use this because it creates spaghetti code that's hard to follow.
    • The biggest use case for "goto" is to implement something resembling an exception handler in C. For instance, say you need to setup something that takes multiple steps, and each of those steps requires acquiring a different resource. If any of those steps fail, you need to release those resources so the function can gracefully exit. To do this without "goto" would require either a bunch of nested if-statements or a Matryoshka doll of function calling, which fills up the stack and may blow up on systems with smaller amounts of memory.
    • There are some use cases for "goto" - modern languages allow you to "goto " which means the jump has semantic meaning (unlike the older "goto " or the Assembler "jump "). The benefit of using a "goto" is that it's a clean way of going away and not coming back which makes it clear that you're not interested in returning to the code you're currently in. Programmers who are against "goto" for religious reasons end up abusing exceptions as a way of abandoning the current code instead.
    • While "goto" is widely considered an Artifact in hand-written code, it's gained new importance in recent years in machine-generated C code (C is also a popular compiler target language now). "goto" commands inserted by machine obviously have none of the problems of the original usage.
• Microsoft Windows:
  • If you take a look around in the folder where Windows is installed, you'll find tons of files that are Artifacts of a bygone era. A lot of them are simply a file that points to the correct version to use. Why bother having these? Backwards compatibility, because either someone out there really wants to run that 20 year old, unsupported app, or a company that makes modern apps hasn't bothered to update a reference from an old version.
  • The main hard drive, the one that contains critical system files, is always labeled C:. So where are A: and B:? Well, early PCs just had an A: drive for your 5¼-inch floppy disk storage and, if you had a souped-up PC, a B: drive for your second 5¼ or some other removable media such as a tape drive. When hard drives came into sporadic use as optional and very expensive peripherals, they were labeled C: because the first two letters were already spoken for. Eventually 3½-inch floppies claimed the A: drive while B: remained used for 5¼. When CD-ROM came onto the scene in the '80s, it used D:. Even though 5¼-inch floppies had fallen out of use by that point, B: remained reserved for a second floppy or some other "optional" (read: obsolete) media. To this day, the optical disc drive is always the last default drive on a PC after the hard drive and any default partitions, while additional partitions, peripherals (such as thumb drives or external hard drives), or LAN connections are listed after it.
    • There's nothing actually stopping you from assigning a hard drive, thumb drive, or network location to either A: or B:, but the default behavior in Windows is if you have a floppy drive of any sort, they start at A:, then B:
  • The .jpg file extension. Contrary to what some may believe, .jpeg is the original name of the file extension, being an initialism of the Joint Photographic Experts Group, who created the format. However, file extensions in versions of Windows before 95 were limited to a maximum of 3 characters, while other operating systems did not have such a restriction. Thus, if a .jpeg file was sent to Windows from one of these, the extension would have to fit the limit, and hence the .jpg extension came to be. However, even in modern versions of Windows, which do support four-character extensions, .jpg still exists and is widely used, as many are used to seeing .jpg as the default or standard for such files, and thus image software like Photoshop still uses .jpg as the default.
  • Microsoft mistakenly believed that the Windows Start Menu became this since XP, which let you drag icons onto the taskbar to click on as a shortcut rather than selecting them in the Menu. Microsoft tried removing this in 8 in favor of a "Start Screen", but significant outcry forced them to bring back the Start button on the taskbar in 8.1 (it was previously on the "charms" bar, accessible by moving the cursor to the bottom right or top right corners of the screen; in either case, it still opens the "Start Screen") and the menu itself in 10. The problem is that the Start menu allows for a much larger number of occasionally used programs to be selected in a very simple and straightforward fashion, and as such it was still really useful to people who used their computer for more than a handful of things.
  • The reason why Microsoft skipped Windows 9 is theorized to be related to this. Back when Windows 95 and 98 (collectively called Windows 9x) were a thing, some programs checked if you were using the right version of Windows by only checking up to "Windows 9." Again, because backwards compatibility is king in Windows, naming the next version of Windows after 8.1 "9" might've caused problems. Microsoft's official reason for jumping straight to Windows 10 was simply there were too many features they skipped a version
• Nintendo 3DS has the YouTube App. Once the New Nintendo 3DS arrived with an updated internet browser that could play videos on it that even included Youtube itself, the App became redundant...for the new system, anyway.
  • Nintendo Video became this once better video apps became available for the system. Its four short, pre-downloaded videos format didn't hold a candle to the multitude of videos found on Youtube and shows and movies found on Netflix. On June 5th 2015, it was announced that NV would be discontinued and the videos would be moved to the Nintendo E-Shop.
• Despite the fact that you can also use it to purchase and download movies, TV shows, audiobooks, and podcasts, Apple's iTunes application is still named for the days when it was primarily music software.
• On a related note, podcasts are named after the iPod, the device they were originally intended to be listened to on. The catch is that iPods have become almost entirely obsolete in favor of more versatile smartphones. Adding to the name's Artifact status is the fact that podcasts didn't really take off until smartphones had mostly displaced standalone MP3 players.
• For that matter, it is still fairly common to refer to portable music players as MP3 players even though other audio formats such as AAC also exist.
• Several keys on a typical full-size keyboard:
  • Have you ever wondered what the "scroll lock" key in your keyboard is for? If you don't know, don't worry. Neither do most of keyboard manufacturers. And this has been so for quite a long time. (In an interview from the early 1980s, PC magazine asked an executive of keyboard manufacturer Key Tronic what was the key's purpose, to which the executive replied: "I don't know, but we put it on ours, too".) To this day the key is added to all keyboards basically solely because it has been so since forever. Only very few programs make any actual use of it. Originally, it was to switch if the arrow keys moved a cursor or moved the page (Notably Microsoft Excel still honors this). Nowadays, the mouse controls that, either through click-and-drag or the wheel button.
  • Pause/Break was used on dumb terminals to tell the mainframe to pause or suspend a program the dumb terminal wanted to be run. It then was used in personal computing environments for the same reason if using a command line launched application; and even back then, most users were more familiar with Ctrl-C (or Cmd-Period on the Mac) as the program-break function. However, it's seen almost no use once GUI based applications started taking over. Plus UNIX-like OSes that use the command line have other commands to do the same function. Modern applications are instead force-quit via a special feature of the OS.
  • The System Request key (or SysRq) was used for specific functions and commands like forcing a reboot or debugging. The same key was also the Print Screen (PrtScn) key where users could print the text on the command line to the printer. Nowadays, System Request is almost never used and the Print Screen function was repurposed to taking a snapshot of the user's screen where they could save it as an image file and share it with others.
  • The Function keys are starting to become this. While still widely used by programs for their original purpose, to provide a set of application-specific shortcuts, it's likely few people use them as such. Instead, they're repurposed for system wide functions like controlling the volume or launching the default internet browser with another key that needs to be held down to use the "original" function.
• Planted explosives are referred to as "mines" because they used to be deployed by tunneling to the objective - for example, the base of a wall.
• The "no smoking" light-up sign on commercial jetliners that are designed in the same way as "fasten seat belt" signs and are still widely used in lieu of more permanent signs such as stickers. Pretty much every airline that cares to continue operating has had smoking banned inside the aircraft at all times of flights since the 1990s, yet on many aircraft, especially older ones, the signs can theoretically be shut off during the flight. Sometimes, in order to keep the circuitry from going to waste, airlines that want to do away with the light-up no smoking signs will replace the light-up signs with "Turn off electronic devices" signs or similar (many airlines forbid using electronic devices during certain phases of the flight, including takeoff and landing) and just install permanent "no smoking" stickers throughout the cabin.
  • In newer aircraft, there may be a lot of things that seem to be artifacts of previous design, such as cutouts for gauges even though the gauge is no longer there. As explained by Mentour Pilot, airplane manufacturers are only allowed to change so much of the cockpit without needing to get it re-certified by some aviation authority. Apparently keeping the cutouts counts as "being the same." A few switches, such as the one for toggling the "No Smoking" sign still remain even if they don't do anything. However, some pilots repurposed the switch to tell them they've done something on the checklist.
• Electric vehicles don't need grilles anymore as they lack an engine to keep cool, but some brands' front ends are just too iconic to exclude them, or would feel empty without some kind of grille-like design there. BMW's i series of cars are one such example, still using the "kidney" grille design on the front end.
• If you're programming in the Fortran language, one of the first things you learn is to add the line "implicit none" to every single program. This is to disable a feature left over from Fortran's earliest days. The oldest versions of Fortran did not allow explicit declaration of variable types, instead using "implicit" typing: variables whose names started with any of the letters IJKLMN were assumed to be integer, all others were assumed to be real. After a few years, FORTRAN 66 (from 1966) added the ability to declare variable types... but for compatibility's sake, implicit typing has remained the default to this very day, and needs to be disabled each and every time.
• This is the reason why DC has both "conventional current" and "electron current" flow theories in digital electronics. Originally, it was believed that electrical current flowed from positive to negative, and so symbols for diodes and transistors were drawn with arrows that reflect this and most theory surrounding digital electronics works with this in mind. When it was discovered that electricity actually flows from negative to positive, engineers realized it really didn't change our understanding of electronics in any practical way: thus, they simply labeled the two different theories and more or less just pretend current still flows from positive to negative (now called conventional current) so they didn't have to change symbols and working habits.
• Both Microsoft Windows and macOS indicate fixed discs with an icon of an old fashioned 3.5 inch hard drive, even if they are a smaller 2.5 disk or an M.2 SSD.

TV & Radio Providers

• [adult swim] was so named because it referred to the period where kids are ordered out of public pools so that only seniors can swim in it, and when it first launched in 2001, it even featured bumpers of kids being told to get out of the pool along with seniors enjoying their time. Sometime around 2003, these were replaced with the "white text on black" style bumpers seen today, though the name hasn't lost all meaning—it still trades in adult oriented shows during hours when most children are in bed for school, though the Canadian version is 24/7.
• The phrase "don't touch that dial" remained in use for decades after a majority of televisions no longer had dials. Strangely enough, it probably became overused during the era where old dial televisions (which had a knob you used to change the channel) had been replaced by those operated by remote control.
• Before seasons of TV shows were made available in collections, a selection of episodes would be sold on VHS, later moving to DVD. Thanks to the invention of internet streaming and the Boxed Set, the sample DVD has lost relevance. While not as common as it used to be, you can still find these disks being sold in places like Best Buy.
  • The term "Boxed Set" has started falling into this as well, with full seasons going into single DVD cases now.
• Saturday-Morning Cartoon blocks fell into this over time. Originally established in the 60s when there were no television stations dedicated towards kids, this specific block was developed to cater towards an untapped demographic. This would also later lead to the creation of the "After School" block of cartoons as well. In the mid eighties and early nineties, the development of the "Big Three" children's channels (Nickelodeon, the Disney Channel, and Cartoon Network) would all slowly deal a blow to the block's relevancy. Slowly during The Noughties, stations began to pull their cartoon blocks, starting with the after school blocks before eventually the Saturday Morning Cartoon blocks also got pulled. The last of them, The Vortexx on The CW, ended its run in September 2014. However this is not universal - the two most popular TV channels in Hungary still have children's programs on weekend mornings despite a variety of children's channels also being available, and in Japan, many broadcast channels air children's shows on weekend mornings, as cable television in Japan is not as widespread as it is in other countries.
• Until the service was ended in 2023, Netflix operated its video retail business through mail order years after it had transitioned into a predominately streaming service. The former had 2 million subscribers and generated $300 million revenue each year, but when you compare them to the over 200 million subscribers and $25 billion revenue its streaming branch generated... they seem rather puny. Netflix once tried to spin-off the retail business into a separate company, but after much public and investor derision, it backtracked. Yet it chose to keep apart both businesses by creating a separate subscription for its streaming service, so many people (particularly those outside the US) don't even know that Netflix originated as video-renting business, much less that it still existed long after it was considered irrelevant.
• The Italian version of Pluto TV includes a channel called Super! Brothers and Sisters, which, as the name suggests, was all about Nickelodeon shows about siblings: more precisely, the channel originally aired Drake & Josh, Nicky, Ricky, Dicky, and Dawn and The Loud House. As time passed by, the channel removed two thirds of its content (with The Loud House getting its own channel) and Nicky, Ricky, Dicky, and Dawn remained as the only show aired: none the less, its logo still features Lincoln and Lori from The Loud House as centerpieces and its commercials aired on other channels are focused entirely on Drake & Josh, even though neither shows are anymore aired there.
• Among the songs in its lineup, the Disney Hits radio station on Sirius XM has the theme song to Ponyo in its rotation, despite Disney not owning the rights to distribute Studio Ghibli films anymore, as they are now owned by GKIDS.
• Freeform (formally CBN Satellite Network from 1977–1981, CBN Cable Network from 1981–1988, The CBN Family Channel from 1988–1990, The Family Channel from 1990–1998, Fox Family Channel from 1998–2001, and ABC Family from 2001–2016) is still contractually obligated to air The 700 Club. They do their damned best to make sure nobody watches it and to make everyone know they do not stand behind anything Pat Robertson has to say: they bury the show at 10AM, 11PM, and 3AM^note (which does give the CBN News segments potential credibility as an alternate news source against the 10AM and 11PM newscasts), airs commercials before it (after the closing credits of the previous show), shows a very snarky disclaimer which encourages viewers to watch Freeform programming on other legit sources while completely disavowing the views expressed by the program, and remove all Freeform branding from the screen during the show's airtime. Considering the very controversial views presented by Robertson's crew and 700's socially conservative demographic directly clashing with the socially progressive one Freeform aims for, the way the network screws it over is not that surprising. Despite the fact that 700 also airs on local stations and religious network TBN, CBN refuses to terminate Freeform's contract to air the show, much to the chagrin of Disney.

Other

• The iconic sight gag of a character reading a newspaper while sitting on the toilet seems to have originated in a time before toilet paper was widely available, when it was considered common to have a wide variety of disposable reading material (newspapers, magazines, department store catalogues, etc.) on hand to use as a substitute. As an example: James Joyce's Ulysses, written in 1922 and set in 1904, includes a scene where Leopold Bloom carries a magazine to his outhouse and briefly reads it on the toilet before tearing off a page and wiping himself with it. It's been a long time since toilet paper was considered a luxury, but the gag still persists, probably because it's a relatively non-vulgar way of signaling that a character is using the bathroom.
• Ever wonder why Santa Claus gave coal to naughty children? Interestingly, it wasn't just to punish them with a "useless" gift—it was to punish them with a gift that was useful but not fun. The coal was meant for burning so that the family could have warmth during the winter. The kid wasn't going to have fun with it, but they were supposed to make good use of it. But nowadays, we live in a world where gas or electric heating is the norm and burning coal for warmth is not only unnecessary for most homes, but frowned upon for environmental reasons. So now, the coal really is a useless gift. In all fairness, some venues portray Santa modernizing this a little by instead giving naughty children socks or underwear for Christmas—once again necessary if not very fun, with the added potential of the underwear being really embarrassing.
• When horse-drawn fire engines were still the norm among firehouses, most American firefighters used dalmatians as "carriage dogs" out of necessity, as they provided a valuable service by clearing obstacles in front of fire engines and guiding firefighters to their destinations. Nowadays, with the dissemination of motorized fire engines, such services aren't actually needed, but many firefighters still keep dalmatians as pets for the sake of tradition, and they've become permanently entrenched in the public imagination as "firehouse dogs".
• Many currency systems have small denominations that are now basically useless, having long since suffered inflation. The US penny is probably the most famous example, to the point that the government now produces them at a loss. They're relics of a period when they were actually worth something - for comparison, when the half-penny was discontinued for being too small of a value in the 1850s, it was worth the modern equivalent of 14 cents. The old currencies more or less survive because motions to get rid of them don't have enough pull. Canada actually averted this by abolishing the penny: buy anything with cash and the price is rounded to the nearest 5 cent.
• Many an adaptation of Peter Pan will still have the "I do believe in fairies!" scene. It originated as part of a pantomime stage show (where Audience Participation is very much ingrained into the performance), but seems a fair bit more incongruous in film or book form. The Disney version is one of a handful of adaptations that don't have it, but even more incongruously, it keeps the scene of Tinkerbell doing a Heroic Sacrifice and being on death's door... at which she then inexplicably gets better, which seemingly reveals why so many adaptations keep it in.
• The phrase "Trick or treat!" is still popularly used as a greeting by young Halloween revelers, who traditionally say it while going door-to-door in search of candy, but its original purpose and meaning have been mostly discarded. It's generally believed to have originated as an ultimatum, giving hapless people an actual choice between a treat (i.e. giving out candy) or a trick (i.e. being the victim of a prank); the implication was that the candy was an offering meant to placate naughty children, who would otherwise run wild and play cruel jokes on their neighbors. While the practice of playing pranks on Halloween isn't dead, the holiday is now generally seen as much more innocent than it once was, and it's much less socially acceptable to use it as an excuse to play pranks.
• Women's bicycles are classically identified by having a top tube that bends downward, also known as a "step-through frame," so that if she's wearing a dress or skirt, she can get on and off without giving everyone a free show. Bikes with a step-through frame are often still marketed as "ladies'" bikes even though not many women these days wear skirts to go bike-riding, especially not serious cyclists. There's also the fact that step-through frames can be convenient for messengers or people with mobility issues regardless of gender. High-quality bicycle manufacturers have caught on though, selling women's bikes with a straight top tube ("men's style" or "diamond-frame") but shorter body length. Others have gone one step further by not gendering bicycles at all, simply selling them based on length and letting riders pick whatever fits them, and offering step-through frames for anyone who prefers them.
• Wedding gift registries. The original idea behind wedding gifts was to present newlyweds with domestic items for their newly-shared home. Once upon a time, couples didn't live together until after they got married, and if they were young enough, they might have still lived with their parents beforehand, so it made sense for their friends and families to gift them with dishware and whatnot. Nowadays, most couples live together long before tying the knot and probably lived independently before dating, meaning there wouldn't be much they don't already have. As a result, wedding gift registries today aren't about practical items a couple needs, but nicer items that they want, and these wishlists can get pretty extravagant. The basic function of avoiding duplicate gifts remains the same, however.
• The Canadian Armed Forces:
  • Both memos and posting messages have strict, mandatory formatting rules that are the result of them being made in a bygone era: memos are spaced in a way to be easily read on paper and to leave space to be amended on that copy to be returned to the member if need be, while posting messages have an obtuse layout designed to be fed through a fax machine and easily read at the receiving end. E-mail has rendered both these purposes completely moot, with posting messages being sent exclusively through e-mail and memos usually sent through e-mail: posting messages haven't changed because nobody's bothered to do it and the only reason memos are still delivered on paper is because of officers who want to write amendments on paper copies to justify the continued use of paper memos.
  • Long field exercises tend to end with a "Smoker", a party of sorts where members are allowed to have a beer or two, are given better food, and a good proper night's sleep the night before they pack up and leave. The reason was originally to give the members a good dose of booze to ensure they went to bed, got a ton of sleep, and thus weren't sleep-deprived the next day while driving home. Nowadays though, even though the Smoker is still held the final night of the exercise, there are limits in how much beer can be given to troops (it's never more than two), and while some commanders are a little lax (generally saying "the limit is two; don't get caught taking more, wink wink") getting drunk is strictly forbidden and will be punished, preventing the original purpose of the exercise.
  • Group punishments are still very widespread, where one or two members of the troop will mess up and the entire troop will be punished with lost days off, extra work, or longer hours. Originally the idea was to "encourage" the rest of the troop to "encourage" the guilty member to do better — in other words haze them or rough them up. Nowadays hazing or such a beating is strictly forbidden, to the point that it can be enough to get members kicked out of the military, but the group punishments continue. Unsurprisingly, this means this style of discipline tends to not work very well, with most members feeling little incentive to try and do better since they feel they'll be punished even when they do well.
• It is considered poor etiquette for a man to button the lowest button on a waistcoat or jacket. Supposedly, this precedent was set by King Edward VII, an Adipose Rex who could not fully button his suit; others did the same in order to avoid offending him, and it stuck. Despite this rule, coats still have that button there, you're just expected to ignore it.
• Costco's store-brand products are named Kirkland Signature, after Kirkland, Washington, which was where Costco originally had their headquarters. They eventually moved to Issaquah, but kept the Kirkland name due to it being much easier to spell and pronounce.
• Australian English favours British spellings such as "labour", but one of the country's biggest political parties is called "Labor" due to being founded during a period when there was a fad for American spellings.
• The Russian film studio Mosfilm, which was founded in the Soviet Union in 1920, has kept its symbol, the sculpture Worker and Kolkhoz Woman, despite The New Russia not being Communist since the end of the Soviet Union in 1991. Though it is consitent with rampant Soviet nostalgia under Vladimir Putin.

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