Laptop Thoughts: The Usefullness of Tech Gone By

"“They just don’t make ‘em like they used to” is a phrase we hear often from old folks and, as I get more years under my belt, I find myself saying it more and more to the young twenty-something whipper snappers in my office. Yeah, I’m talking about the same ones who’ve never played a cassette tape, dialed up to a BBS, or booted into DOS. While my young friends can count themselves lucky that they never encountered a busy signal when connecting to Compuserve, there are some great technologies from the past 30 years that would serve us well today–if only time and corporate bean counters hadn’t passed them by."

I have to wonder if some of the entries in this list are just there to make people question the sanity of the writer. Some of these technologies died for very good reasons, be it economical or just plain logical. Of the things that I miss, I would pick things like the Butterfly keyboard, latches on screens and a scroll wheel for adjusting the volume on laptops. What are your favorites of technology gone by?