Technologies I thought my son would never use
Taleb talks about the Lindy effect and some of the surprises in this article can be explained it.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect</a><p>The rough heuristic is: the longer a technology has been around, the longer it will last into the future.<p>That is, it's NOT the case that every piece of technology lasts roughly the same amount of time, and then is replaced.<p>For example, a chair vs. an iPhone.  Which one will be used further into the future?  Almost certainly a chair.<p>----<p>Land lines have been around a lot longer than fax machines (both in the article), so they will likely outlive fax machines.<p>Will HTML or JavaScript last longer?  Probably HTML, since it came first.<p>What about ASCII or HTML?  Probably ASCII.<p>These have a "dependency stack" issue, but it applies regardless.  And I think that is part of the phenomenon -- low level technologies that are widely adopted take longer to go away.  Plumbing, electrical (AC vs DC), land lines, TCP/IP, BIOS, etc.<p>I can't find a link now, but there was a recent Kevin Kelly article about finding farming tools from a catalog in the 1800's still in use.   I think he said that almost EVERY one was still in use, or able to be purchased, which is a nice illustration of the point.  It takes a long time for old tech to die, and arguably it never does.