Enduring relics

Some technology just refuses to die.  It may have been shipped off to the nursing home but it still manages to sneak out on the town once in a while.

Why is that?  What is it about certain gadgets that lets them live on well past their sell by date?  Technologies that we depended on last century should be well and truly buried by now but some of them just won't lie down.

I loved my Palm IIIxe

Take the Personal Digital Assistant (PDA).  The Palm Pilot and its ilk were highly desirable once upon a time.  However, with the advent of the smartphone, which is a PDA and a zillion other things besides, you would think that there was no market for the humble Palm.  Not so.

According to the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), 350,000 PDAs were sold in the United States last year.  I doubt that you personally helped the figure along but if you work for a company that sells product lines they may well have been a contributor.  PDAs have long been used for stock control in warehouses and shops and that need is still there.  Just because new technology is available it doesn't mean that companies have thrown out the systems they've used for years.  So, yes, the PDA may be dead as a consumer gadget but it still has a niche in industry, and for good reason.

My first SLR: Canon AE1 Program

Maybe there's also a niche for photo film cameras too.  Although the digital camera has very publicly killed the likes of the once mighty Kodak, film stock refuses to die.  You can still buy single use, disposable film cameras and camera buffs need film for those quirky cameras they still play around with.  You also have to appreciate that just because something is old doesn't mean that everyone will stop using it.  People who have grown up with film and have a camera that they know and love will still support the technology, even if becomes increasingly difficult to source the film stock and the processing services.

Simplicity personified: the Rega Planar 3 turntable

A similar situation exists with vinyl records. Compact discs should have killed vinyl off years ago and digital
music services over the net should have mopped up any stragglers but no, vinyl is more popular now than it has been since its heyday.  Why?  Because people like the sound they get from vinyl.  They like the big footprint of the 33 and the wonderful equipment that plays these plastic discs.  Even price seems no barrier to sales, with vinyl releases costing considerably more than digital downloads or CDs.

People have long sounded the death knell for these technologies but when the user base for that obsolete gadget still supports it, you cannot truly kill it off.

12 obsolete technologies that refuse to die (Yahoo)