5 Office Machines Made Obsolete in the 21st Century | Phonebooth ...

Living in the future has made some parts of business life more complex. Where previous businesses just had to get a big enough Yellow Pages ad, you have to understand umpteen different kinds of social media. Where a 20th century business had only a few communications options, you have dozens.

But it?s not all frustrating complexity. The 21st century has streamlined the modern office by letting you jettison a lot of must-have office machines in favor of virtual services and multitaskers. Here are five machines the last century made vital, but are already museum pieces in modern commerce.

1. Credit Card Machines

In the beginning was the slide machine, that device you set your card inside and used to make a carbon paper imprint of your card with a satisfying ?kerchunk? noise. Next came electronic card processing, which needed a phone line and forced you to lease a machine at an exorbitant rate. Mobile technology has replaced these with an app and a peripheral, and even the peripheral will be gone within the next five years.

2. Land Line Phone Systems

Old offices needed a complicated physical phone system with a tangle of cable leading from every device to the trunk line. Cell phones make the entire communications tree wireless, while a cloud based phone system, like Phonebooth, sends communications over the same lines you use for Internet service.

3. Fax Machines

Facsimile machines were an impressive invention at the time, a way to instantly send images and letters with a reasonable level of quality. Today, a scanner and an Internet connection do the same job with higher fidelity and lower cost. Even if you deal with a ?traditionalist? who won?t throw away his own fax, you can receive that fax via email through a variety of inexpensive services.

4. Cash Registers

This one might be less obsolete than it is simply evolving. The first cash registers were physical devices, using internal gears and levers to combine an adding machine with a simple cash drawer. Electronic versions came next, using a calculator instead of an adding machine and adding new functions for efficiency and security. Then they added bar code scanners, and then peripherals for a desktop. The mobile revolution has taken this one step further, allowing you to handle transactions via an easily portable tablet armed with a couple of simple apps.

5. Desktop Computers

In 2011, ?smartphones outsold desktop computers for the first time ? and the margin is expected to widen substantially when final 2012 numbers come in. Add cloud computing to facilitate group projects via laptop, and the age of the behemoth workstation looks to be drawing to a close.

Offices aren?t the only places technology is moving at such a rapid pace. Comment to tell us about your favorite science fiction toy you use every day.

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Jason has contributed over 2,000 blog and magazine articles to publications local, regional and national. He speaks regularly at writing and business conferences. You can find out more about Jason at his website.

Source: http://www.phonebooth.com/blog/2012/12/5-office-machines-obsolete-21st/

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