This morning I mentioned my telephone answering machine in passing and a colleague reacted as though I had just confessed to still having an 8-track in my car.

“You must be the last person on the planet to still be using one,” he said dismissively.

In fact, I am not. It took me all of two attempts to find another colleague who also still has an honest-to-goodness physical answering machine.

A bit of Googling failed to produce any statistics, but it did uncover a New York Times story reporting on what was then a relatively new phenomenon of answering-machine ownership by consumers. It was published in 1982, which — pardon me for living — doesn’t seem all that long ago.

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