10 Technologies That Should Be Extinct (But Aren’t) - mendozahamprat

Got an urgent message you need to transmit immediately? Sending a telegram is likely not the first choice that comes to judgment. And when it's time to boogie-woogie down, you belik put on't shove a cassette into your 8-track player or slap an LP onto your phonograph.

These technologies served their purpose for a while, then either evolved into cheaper, quicker, major forms Beaver State simply disappeared. Still else technologies–such arsenic fax machines, landline phones, and instant cameras–just refuse to die, disdain better digital alternatives.

Here are 10 technologies that should be out and buried, yet still cling to life.

1. The Wire

Yes, Virginia, you can still send a telegram, though not through Western Union. IT sent its last telegraphic transmission happening January 27, 2006. At the telegram's peak in 1929, more than 200 million were sent. By 2005, that number had dwindled to 21,000.

Subsequently, iTelegram took over Western Federal's teletypewriter network, though you can approach it via the Web. To send a first-class priority (same-twenty-four hour period) content from New House of York to City of the Angels now costs $25, plus 88 cents a Christian Bible. (Plus whatever it costs to refill your meds–because who in their perpendicular mind would trouble oneself to beam a telegram?) Western Union is hush around too, though its of import customers appear to be Net scam artists hoping to take in suckers into wiring them money.

2. Typewriters

In the maturat of Web tablets and smartphones, typewriters are a bit like Fred Flintstone's automobile–strictly for cave dwellers. Yet multitude still purchase and use them. In 2009, for example, the New York City Law Department made headlines when it spent just about $1 million on typewriters, mostly sol it could stay on to use multipart carbon forms for processing evidence.

Hush, the typewriter's primary market appears to personify snooty novelists World Health Organization call they cannot frame on whatsoever technology introduced since Hemingway took a dirt nap. Incase in point: Last December, author Cormac McCarthy's 1950's era Olivetti Lettera 32 portable sold for an astounding $255,000 at auction. (We understand that price also included a twelvemonth's supply of Wite-Proscribed correction graceful.) Proceeds were donated to the Santa Atomic number 26 Institute. McCarthy promptly went out and bought another $20 manual typewriter to take its place. We guess that means there's even so at to the lowest degree one body politic for old men.

3. Fax Machines

Contempt advances in Net fax services and the handiness of dirt-cheap scanners, this business office machine of the 1980s is tranquillize with USA–Sir Thomas More than one-half a million of them were purchased over the past 12 months, according to the NPD Group, a grocery research companionship. It's non just hoi polloi who still wear shoulder pads and buy Cyndi Lauper albums. These screechy, annoying gadgets continue to attract realtors, lawyers, insurance companies, and others aflutter about the genuineness of signed documents without an ink-based John or Jane Hancock on them.

"Their endurance is in percentage a testament to the failure of digital signatures that would allow us to e-mail certified copies of contracts and similar documents," says NPD Group psychoanalyst Sir John Ros Rubin. "As with electronic ballot machines, there remains a flat of societal skepticism over the viability of digitally qualified documents."

As for the rest of you? Catch ended IT, writes Steve John Adams, VP of marketing for Protus, the parent company of online fax service MyFax.

"Telefax machines are just so 1980s," he says. "If you're even so exploitation one, it's clock to put it in the attic side by side to your legwarmers and that re-create of The Breakfast Club on VHS and move to an Internet fax service instead."

4. Landline Telephones

According to the latest survey from the Nationalist Nerve centre for Health Statistics, nearly 25 percent of Americans take up ditched their landlines for a cell phone. Another 22 million close to Americans pay for a VoIP service like Vonage to extend and touch. Still, that leaves well over 100 million households firmly tethered to one of Ma Gong's bastard offspring. (No uncertainty many of these lines are also plugged into fax machines.)

Wherefore? Because nothing says "I've fallen and I tail't get up" rather like a landline. Only 5 percent of adults age 65 or older hold up in wireless-solitary households, per the NCHS–no doubt in theatrical role because mobile E911 emergency services still aren't as reliable as calling for help from your trusty wall-mounted phone. As that universe gradually moves toward that great untimely bird special in the toss, landlines will likely follow.

5. Turntables

CDs and MP3s were supposed to drink dow the long-playacting album for good. Instead, vinyl group LPs have clung to life longer than Abe Vigoda–and along with them, the honourable turntable. Gross revenue of vinyl albums actually increased last-place class, from 1.9 million to 2.8 meg, according to Nielsen SoundScan, though that's still fair a come by the bucketful compared to CDs (374 million) and digital tracks (1.2 billion). These years, you can get a digital lazy Susan that plugs into your PC and converts groove-laden tunes into digital files for carrying on your iPod. Either agency, this is a good thing; life's sensible better when listened to at 33 and 1/3.

6. Cash Registers

Ka-ching! Disdain the emergence of computerised point-of-sale systems that can mechanically track inventory, identify your pass-selling products and best customers, and simplify hindmost-end account, thousands of retail stores still rely happening what's essentially a cigar box that can do third-grad math.

"The basics of the cash register haven't varied since it was fictional 127 years ago," notes Tom Greenhaw, founder of CashierLive, a company that offers Web-based point-of-cut-rate sale software. "While [it] might be powered aside electrical energy today, it still keister't tell you what your store has in timeworn (and it never will). Computers with point-of-sale software are expensive, which is why a majority of minute retailers nevertheless stick with the dying cash registry. But Web engineering science is finally coming to eliminate the cash register."

Alkalic cash registers–and really, cash itself–are linear dinosaurs in the digital jungle of financial transactions. It's time for them to check out.

7. Instant Cameras

Like their distant cousins the snooty novelists, many camera buffs eschew extremity for the comfort of darkrooms and the aroma of developer changeful. Equal the venerable Polaroid Instant Photo is making a comeback.

The original Polaroid fellowship filed for failure (for the second sentence) in 2008 and had its assets purchased in April 2009 by a inward holding fellowship. Despite that, the newly revived firm has introduced an updated translation of the OneStep camera (the Polaroid PIC 300) that, yes, uses instant film. That spark downcast computer memory lane will set you rachis $90 for the camera–nonnegative a steep $1 per shot. Polaroid has even hired pop diva Lady Gaga as "constructive theatre director." If Polaroid can survive Lady Gaga, it may be with us for a long, long fourth dimension.

8. Phonograph record Drives

Polished plastic platters of wholly kinds–Four hundred, DVD, even Blu-ray–are destined to eventually come the various floppies, Goose egg discs, Click drives, and separate portable storage media into the digital boneyard. These days, many of us get our software via downloads and our amusement streamed to whatever device happens to be convenient. Yet discs and magnetic disk drives persevere.

"You can download almost anything now and stream much of what you seat't download," says Fleece Enderle, principal analyst for the Enderle Group. "Flash drives have dropped well in price, and we don't really deman more than 64GB anyway (and you fire get that in an iPod). So why don't we say hasta atomic number 57 vista to the disk drive and finally move to something lighter, much robust, and less noisy?"

9. Cathode Ray Tubes

In the Conjunct States, the honourable 'boob tube' has all but disappeared from offices, living rooms, and retail shelves. Yet more than 90 million CRTs were sold last year, says an Massachusetts Institute of Technology describe–almost all of them to Asia and Latin America.

Why? Because they are both durable and cheap, and–guess what?–they still offer higher-quality pictures than LCDs and plasma sets, according to the image standardisation experts at DisplayMate. As wel in high postulate: grizzly, discarded CRTs, because their lead-lined glass is needed for manufacturing current ones.

10. CB Radios

Though non as wildly popular every bit they were backbone when Burt Reynolds was, recovered, Burt Reynolds, vendors like Cobra Electronics and RadioShack still sell thousands of Citizens Striation radios p.a..

Geeky graybeards will commemorate that the first CompuServe schmooze forum was called "CB Simulator." From thither IT's soft to draw a direct line to nowadays's chat, IM, and Twitter clients. Even, in the era of ubiquitous 24/7 communicating, CB radios are a relic, argues Jim Gardner, president of marketing consultancy Scheme 180, who bought his prototypal Cobra CB radio in 1977 (his handle is "Bootlegger").

"Although not 10-17 (urgent), my 10-20 (positioning) on the issue is that acknowledged that the peak of CB radios' mainstream adoption coincided with bell bottoms, disco, and orange screw carpeting, the advent of push-to-talking cell phones should have buried this icon of bad Burt Reynolds films old age ago," atomic number 2 says. "After all, some conversations are merely better 10-21 (on the phone). 10-4, good buddy?"

Though we challenge to the "hopeless Burt Reynolds films" swipe (Smokey and the Brigand and Cannonball Run for are fry classics), we tend to agree: It's time to bring the hammer down.

Contributing Editor Dan Tynan noneffervescent misses his old Smith-Corona manual typewriter (merely not very some). Catch his wacky brand of geeky humor at eSarcasm , or follow him on Twitter: @tynan_on_tech .

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