ten technologies that refuse to die

摘要

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 Like paper, the 10 technologies that follow have seemingly been surpassed and superseded at one time or other, written off as road kill on the highway of progress.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.