Today’s newest, fastest and best technology will soon look like a relic to future shoppers. With each new update, release and revision, the last version immediately feels primitive. Some products last just a few years, others endure for centuries, but one thing is certain – obsolescence is often inevitable. A look at our telephones and associated devices gives a good picture of what is happening.
Alexander Graham Bell revolutionized human communication when he made the first phone call to his assistant, Thomas Watson. The landline was born and it dominated for more than a century. The mobile era, however, signaled the end for the old-fashioned landline. In 2017, lawmakers in Illinois finally voted to allow AT&T to stop serving the state’s 1.2 million remaining landline customers.
Rotary Telephones. 1919-1975
Although Bell developed a primitive version in 1950, it took until 1975 for push button phones to make an impact. Tone-enabled features like call waiting and three-way calling signaled the beginning of the end for the slow, clumsy rotary dialing system, which had ruled since 1919.
Phone Booths. 1878-2011
Before phones were pocket-sized supercomputers, people had to stop if they wanted to make calls on the go. The places they stopped to make those calls were called phone booths. Once a familiar sight phone booths – like the landlines and phone books contained within – were dealt a mortal blow by the arrival of cell phones. Just 100,000 pay phones remain compared to 2 million in 1999.
Phone Books. 1878-2012
In 2007, Bill Gates predicted that “Yellow Page usage among people, say, below 50, will drop to zero – near zero – over the next five years.” More than a decade later, the 20th century relic refuses to die, with bound white and yellow paper directories of business and residential phone numbers still showing up on doorsteps across the country. But while they are still being produced, how often are they actually used in the era of smartphones and Google?
Answering Machines. 1971 – mid-2000s
In 1971, the world met the telephone answering machine with the debut of the PhoneMate Model 400. Now that you didn’t actually have to be home to know who called and what they wanted, the devices changed telephone communication forever. Then along came voicemail, which instantly made countertop machines with little tapes inside feel primitive. Then came cell phones. Then came smartphones. There are still some answering machines left in service, but they are the last of their kind.
1-900 Numbers. 1971-2012
The first known use of the 1-900 number was for the “Ask President Carter” talk radio broadcast, but the exchange became pop culture fodder when Eddie Murphy urged viewers to call one such number in defense of a lobster on “Saturday Night Live.” Soon 1-900 became the curse of parents everywhere when commercials featuring child-focused phone lines as well as adult chat lines became almost unavoidable. Thanks to strict blocking laws approved by the Supreme Court and an FTC ban on 1-900 commercials targeting children, the area code all but disappeared by 2002. Verizon dropped the very last one in 2012.
Dial-Up Modems (56K). 1996-2013
Do you want to use the phone or the computer? At the dawn of the internet age in the 1990s, this was the decision you would have faced if you wanted to get online. Then, 56k dial-up modems were associated with crushingly slow speeds, long startup times and frequent crashes. Then, as early as 2004, Newsweek reported on the “Death of Dial-Up,” which was on the decline thanks to the arrival of broadband. By 2013, just 3 percent of the country was still shackled to dial-up – a drop of 15 percent over the year prior.
The first pager was originally developed for a hospital in 1949. One-way pager use hit its peak in 1998, and then began a rapid downward spiral. The arrival of the two-way cell phone quickly rendered the technology – long a mainstay of drug dealers and doctors – a relic as the digital age drew near.
Fax Machines. 1843 – late 2000s
It’s hard to believe that fax machines have clung to the bottom rung of the office tech ladder for as long as they have. Although facsimile machines aren’t quite dead, they are certainly a dying breed, at least compared to the technology’s peak of popularity in 1997 when 3.6 million of the loud, bulky machines were sold. Faxing was perfected to near-modern standards in the early 1900s, but the technology was so expensive that it was out of reach for most businesses until the 1980s. Today, services like FaxZero, launched in 2006, allow anyone with an email address and an internet connection to send faxes for free, which doesn’t bode well for the future of the fax machine. U.S. sales of fax machines fell by more than half from $181 million in 2005 to $70 million in 2010.