One of the hallmarks of the modern world is that technology marches ever onward. Every day, new products are created that we didn't know we needed until they hit the market. Then we find them indispensable, like the cell phone and Apple Computer's outstandingly popular iPod digital music player.
New technologies often debut promising to push their obsolete predecessors aside over night. However, some technologies that were consigned to the dustbin of history years ago not only refuse to die; in some cases they thrive and prosper. Eric Scigliano recently examined ten of these technologies, and why they refuse to die, in Technology Review, MIT's magazine of innovation. Analog watches, for example, are pathetic one-trick ponies compared with digital watches; all they do is display the time. But they do it elegantly and intuitively, and sales of high-end mechanical analog watches have grown dramatically in recent years. Fax machines, with their paper jams and busy signals, ought to have been supplanted by e-mail and scanners long since. Yet, American consumers bought more than 2 million fax machines in 2002.