With more of us working from home at least part-time, we thought it would be interesting to see how many people still used legacy home office devices. About a quarter of Americans still use a landline phone at home, according to our survey. I still have one myself, but just because my internet bill would actually be $5 a month higher if I dropped it. (We do like that it still works whenever the power goes out, though.)
While downloading software has now become the norm, 15 percent of Americans have used a CD to install a program or to back up data in the past year.
Before there was email, many of us sent faxes; 11 percent of Americans still do, while 7 percent have used a physical answering machine in the past year.
Tom Hanks has a high-profile fondness for the clickety-clack virtues of old-school typewriters, but he’s in a small minority: Only 4 percent of Americans still use one, about the same small number who continue to rely on a Rolodex for keeping contacts, or a microcassette recorder for recording interviews or messages. Even fewer folks use a floppy disc—wait, you can still buy floppy discs?—or a pager, which if I recall correctly was an alphanumeric messaging device mainly used by doctors, self-important businesspeople, and drug dealers.
Only 2 percent still rely on that former bane of my existence, the dot-matrix printer.
More than half of Americans apparently use none of these devices. I imagine my wife would tell you that they, and their partners, are happier for it.
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