Since the 1980s, the number of households with answering machines leveled off at about 50% in the United States. With the advent of the widespread use of cell phones in the 1980s in Europe and Asia, and in the 1990s in the U.S., the manufacture of answering machines went into decline. Voicemail, the service that has largely replaced the stand-alone answering machine, was pioneered in the 1970s, as telephone transmission and switching equipment was being replaced by new digital designs that offered more customer features. The “digital revolution” briefly touched conventional answering machines, as the familiar tape cartridge (which had shrunk over the course of the 1980s from standard cassettes to microcassettes) disappeared, replaced by semiconductor memory. By the early 1990s, U.S. telephone service providers were offering customers inexpensive, centralized voice mail via their home telephones, a service which is widely used today. Additionally, nearly every cell phone provider offered voicemail as a “standard feature” from the early 1990s on. Today, ownership of the answering machine has become a sign of technological backwardness, and of low social status. Hardly a fitting end for a product that struggled so long to make its way into our lives.
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