The “takeoff” period for answering machine occurred after 1984, when AT&T split up and customers finally had complete freedom to buy their own telephone equipment. At that point, answering machines began to sell more than 1,000,000 units per year, the technology became standardized, and prices plummeted. For a decade or so, answering machines were nearly unchallenged, but later in the 1990s, telephone companies began offering “voice mail” services (which had been available since at least the 1970s at the offices of IBM and some other companies). Voice mail duplicated the functions of the answering machine.  However, the sales of home answering machines remained high. It was the advent of the cell phone that finally saw the answering machine’s undoing. Today, it is still easy to purchase an answering machine (usually with digital recording rather than analog tape), but the last days of standalone answering machines are probably near.

A Phone-Mate, one of the major brands of the 1980s