10 technologies that refuse to die

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

Delivered-To: dfarber+ () ux13 sp cs cmu edu
Date: Fri, 20 Feb 2004 17:59:44 -0500
From: "Aston, Adam" <Adam_Aston () businessweek com>
Subject: 10 technologies that refuse to die
To: dave () farber net

dave, food for thought -- perhaps of interest for IP'ers... - adam

http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/scigliano0204.asp?p=1

Ten Technologies That Refuse to Die
From typewriters to vacuum tubes, these 10 technologies aren't as
obsolete as you might think.

By Eric Scigliano
February 2004

In technology, as in biology, we like to imagine evolution proceeding
onward and upward. As new species and technologies appear, their
primitive ancestors drop by the wayside, right? Not exactly. Mammals,
birds, and flowering plants-all relatively recent innovations-might seem
to rule the earth today. But far older designs, from barnacles to
crocodiles, are doing just fine in their respective niches, thank you.
New species don't always evolve to replace old ones; they also fill
vacant niches, which in turn can actually solidify the standing of older
species. So it is with technology.

Paper and bytes are the classic example. In the early 1980s, at the dawn
of the PC age, high-volume electronic storage and
transmission-360-kilobyte floppy disks! 14-kilobit-per-second
modems!-were supposed to make paper superfluous and forests safe. Hah.
Electronic data just begat more paper copies. Writers who used to
carefully mark corrections on pecked-out manuscripts began printing out
one revised version after another. Web surfers started printing out
whatever looked interesting. Having data on-screen didn't stop people
from wanting to read it, share it, and store it on paper.
Like paper, the 10 technologies that follow have seemingly been
surpassed and superseded at one time or other, written off as road kill
on the highway of progress. But reports of their demise have proved
greatly exaggerated. All have survived, and some have thrived, in their
supposed obsolescence-not as cult artifacts (everything from buggy whips
to eight-tracks has its fans and collectors), but because they fill real
needs that their more sophisticated successors don't.

Consider these venerable survivors in the pages ahead.

Analog watches Compared to today's digital timepieces, old-fashioned,
sweep-hand watches are pathetic one-trick ponies. Digital-watch wearers
can check temperature, altitude, and the time in Tokyo, play tunes and
games, and send messages. Can wristwatch videoconferencing, Web surfing,
and tarot readings be far off? But what digital watches can't do,
according to sweep-hand proponents, is display the time and context as
elegantly and intuitively as an analog model. Children often start out
with the digital bells and whistles, then graduate to a sweep hand; then
finally, perhaps, they dispense with electronics altogether and acquire
an all-mechanical, high-end trophy watch-sales of which have grown
dramatically in recent years. In the end, how a device performs its
essential job matters more than its extra functions.

Dot-matrix printers Time was, back in the 1980s, that the clickety-click
of dot matrix was the sound of progress. Now it's just a memory for most
PC users, who want ink-jet or laser printers to churn out family photos
and fancy letterheads. But just as dinosaurs evolved into birds-so the
theory goes-dot matrix has gotten a jazzier name ("impact printing") and
survived as an industrial tool rather than a consumer toy. For
accounting firms, banks, and pharmacies with reams of data to print out
(and for whom speed, reliability, and economy actually count for more
than looks), dot-matrix-er, impact-printing still works. Small wonder:
today's impact rigs can print up to 2,000 lines a minute, over 500,000
pages a month, for less than a fifth of a cent per page-versus one cent
per page and up for ink-jet and laser printers. Epson still offers 12
models, while Okidata advertises 36.

Typewriters These original impact printers seem as remote as quills to
the generation nursed on PCs. But they too have confounded expectations:
in 2002, Americans bought 434,000 word processors and electronic
typewriters, according to the Consumer Electronics Association. Even
manual machines hold their niche. Olympia and Olivetti still make
classic machines. Consider the advantages: no viruses to catch, no hard
drives or software to get corrupted, no batteries to run down.
Typewriters do one thing computers can't-fill out printed forms-and are
faster at addressing envelopes and other one-shot jobs that usually
don't entail revisions. Affection and habit also sustain old machines.
One Seattle typewriter repairman says that aging writers who "prefer
simplicity and don't want to learn computers" are what keep him in
business. And you needn't worry about your system going obsolete if it
already is.

Broadcast radio This medium was declared D.O.A. after commercial
television stormed the scene in the late 1940s. TV stole radio's top
shows, national sponsors, and central place in the home. But this
erstwhile dinosaur was quickly repositioned to exploit the next decade's
social and technological changes. Portability was key: transistors and
cars made radio the mobile medium of an increasingly mobile society.
Suburbs, superhighways, and longer commutes provided a vast captive
audience. Mass-market youth culture, disc jockeys, and, later, talk
jocks opened new franchises. With TV glomming the national market and
local newspapers folding in droves, radio became a more local medium,
airing hometown news, sports, weather, and traffic reports. Now,
ownership consolidation and cookie-cutter programming are reversing that
trend; and mobile-Internet games, MP3s, and instant messaging threaten
radio's franchise as the real-time, go-anywhere companion. But hey,
radio has been pronounced obsolete before.

Pagers The teens who made these devices essential fashion accessories in
the early '90s graduated to cell phones, and even RadioShack stopped
selling them. But pager sales rose in 2002, contrary to industry
expectations. Some institutions still rely heavily on pagers: police
departments, whose officers' hands and gun belts are often too full for
cell phones; hospitals, where cell-phone signals would interfere with
diagnostic equipment; and schools, which can't readily afford cellular
service. And pagers still beat cell phones in some ways. They're
cheaper, with no roaming charges. They need far fewer transmitters than
cell phones but still provide better coverage, so they work in the dead
spots between local "cells." And pagers tend not to jam up in
emergencies the way overloaded cells may. Best of all, they are far less
likely to make you crash your car or turn you into a yakking boor. And
now, two-way text messaging makes them a plausible alternative to
phones.

Reel-to-reel tape Cassettes supplanted reel-to-reel for home recording
in the 1960s; now cassettes have given way to CD players and recorders.
So surely tape is as defunct as the dodo? Not quite. Many analog tape
sizes, from two-track .63-centimeter (quarter-inch) to 24-track
five-centimeter (two-inch), are still available. Some recording
engineers still swear by tape, which they claim captures nuances of
sound that even the most byte-heavy digital recorder can't-just as
ardent audiophiles still swear by vinyl records played on $10,000 laser
turntables. And a few firms still offer two-track 1.27-centimeter
(half-inch) players. "The market's pretty steady," says Dan Palmer,
former product-development director at the high-end manufacturer Otari.
"Archiving" is what drives it: customers buy the players to transfer
precious taped works to digital. Vacuum tubes Audiophiles have sustained
another technology that's even older than magnetic tape. In the 1970s,
compact, energy-efficient transistors boded to replace vacuum tubes
entirely. But transistors couldn't satisfy some guitar players and hi-fi
cognoscenti. "We use vacuum tubes because they sound good," says Victor
Tiscareno, a trained violinist and vice president of engineering at Red
Rose Music, a maker of high-end home audio systems. Low-distortion,
solid-state-transistor sound "looks lovely on an oscilloscope," he
explains. "But what we measure and what we hear aren't the same. Vacuum
tubes just sound more human, more lifelike." And after Armageddon, they
may be the last amplifiers left standing; rumor has it the U.S.
government still keeps backup tubes in case an electromagnetic pulse
wipes out vital communications circuits.
Fax machines With e-mail and scanners nearly universal, these clunky
devices should be obsolete: why deal with paper jams and busy signals?
Yet American consumers bought over two million fax machines in 2002. Fax
is still the fastest way to transmit on-paper images, documents, and
marked-up text. While some occupations (journalism) have moved
overwhelmingly to e-mail, others remain stuck on fax. Real estate, with
its endlessly amended offers, counteroffers, waivers, and warranties,
still runs on it. Lawyers also remain big faxers. The rest of us grimace
and use it when we have to.

Mainframe computers These big rigs costing over $1 million apiece have
been dismissed as dinosaurs-big, lumbering, expensive ones at that-since
the PC arrived. But the explosion of Windows networks and Unix servers
obscured the fact that banks and other institutions have continued
relying on mainframes for large-scale data processing. And "big iron"
has seen a minor resurgence in the new millennium: IBM's mainframe sales
rose in 2001 for the first time since 1989 and have continued to
increase. Speed, security, and reliability are also motives: IBM claims
a once-in-30-years failure rate for its latest model, the z990.

Fortran Forty-seven years after IBM unleashed it, Fortran (formula
translation), the original "high-level" programming language, would seem
to be the infotech equivalent of cuneiform. But it's still widely used,
especially in scientific computing. Why has this Eisenhower-era veteran
outlasted so many hardware and software generations? "It's partly the
learning curve," says Hewlett-Packard Laboratories' Hans Boehm, former
chair of the Association for Computing Research's special-interest group
on programming languages. "For some people it's good enough, and it's
hard to let go of something once you learn it." Adaptability and
compatibility, which made Fortran the programmers' lingua franca in the
1960s and '70s, are also key to its viability. Major upgrades have
boosted efficiency and added features while preserving old versions
intact. So a vast number of tried-and-true Fortran 77 programs jibe with
the current Fortran 90. Microsoft, take note. 

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