Heard this story on NPR this morning: Kevin Kelly, of Cool Tools, opines that anything we ever invented is still in use somewhere on the planet. Robert Krulwich worked pretty hard to disprove that notion, and in the end, could not.
It is a sign of my particular nerdiness that I immediately thought of an invention we had completely abandoned: the Saturn V rocket. But even then I forgot about hobbyists and museums. The Cosmosphere in Kansas will build you an Apollo capsule if the price is right – as they did for Apollo 13 (indeed, they restored the original Apollo 13 capsule Odyessy). And a number of hobbyists have built or are building working models – both emulated and in hardware – of the Apollo flight computers. Indeed, I have this emulator right here on my Mac.
So old tools never die. I find that comforting.