Got an urgent message you need to transmit immediately? Sending a telegram is likely not the first option that comes to mind. And when it’s time to boogie down, you probably don’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, faster, better forms or simply disappeared. Yet other technologies–such as fax machines, landline phones, and instant cameras–just refuse to die, despite better digital alternatives.
Here are ten technologies that should be dead and buried, yet still cling to life.
1. The Telegraph
Yes, Virginia, you can still send a telegram, though not through Western Union. It sent its last telegraphic transmission on 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 Union’s telex network, though you can access it via the Web. To send a first-class priority (same-day) message from New York to Los Angeles now costs $25, plus 88 cents a word. (Plus whatever it costs to refill your meds–because who in their right mind would bother to send a telegram?) Western Union is still around too, though its primary customers appear to be Internet scam artists hoping to dupe suckers into wiring them money.
2. Typewriters
In the age of Web tablets and smartphones, typewriters are a bit like Fred Flintstone’s car–strictly for cave dwellers. Yet people still buy and use them. In 2009, for example, the New York City Police Department made headlines when it spent nearly $1 million on typewriters, mostly so it could continue to use multipart carbon forms for processing evidence.
Read more: Programmica
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