I may have an original 1984 Macintosh on my work desk, but I will never ever get a tattoo of it. EVER. A ZX Spectrum, on the other side, is a very likely possibility. It just depends on the amount of Zacapa rum and Margaritas this weekend.

Note to the VHS tattoo dude: If you are going to drill a video tape into your skin for the rest of your life, at least pick a Sony Beta. [Obsolete]

Technology is all about what's new and what's next—today's iPhone is just tomorrow's paperweight. What about the things that were "new" and "next" yesterday or the day before? We live in a time of so much change and progress that there's nostalgia for things that kinda still exist. Here are a few that, for better or worse, are fading fast.

Got any more dead innovations you want to lament or wish good riddance? Chances are Anna Jane covered them in her book, but until you pick up a copy, you might as well comment about it below.

Anna Jane Grossman is the author of Obsolete: An Encyclopedia of Once-Common Things Passing Us By (Abrams Image) and the creator of iamobsolete.net. Her writing has appeared in dozens of publications, including the New York Times, Salon.com, the Associated Press, Elle and the Huffington Post. She has a complicated relationship with technology, but she does have an eponymous website: AnnaJane.net. Follow her on Twitter at @AnnaJane. [ Photo of Anna Jane by Amber Marlow Blatt, from Hey Brooklyn]

Three percent of all the electronic components in the world become obsolete every month. When you imagine all the shit coming out of China, it's pretty staggering. The problem is actually worse for the military, which spends about $10 billion a year on keeping up obsolete electronics parts. Ironically it's because they've switched to using off-the-shelf consumer electronics for 90 percent of their components—with a much shorter service life, four years at best—rather than "military-spec" gear, which was designed to hang around for a decade or more.

IEEE Spectrum lists a couple of egregious examples: The B-2 Spirit, one of Jesus' favorite planes, started flying in 1989, and by 1996, lots of its electronic components were obsolete. And in the Navy's new sonar system, 70 percent of the parts were obsolete when they started installing it.

Finding the parts isn't just difficult, it's expensive as hell, so the cost of maintaining obsolete but very necessary wares basically keeps you from upgrading. In the NYC subway case, instead of moving to a new, modern computerized system that would probably be cheaper in the long run, the Metropolitan Transit Authority has had to focus its limited budget on maintaining the frail, antediluvian network, trapping New Yorkers into an transit system light years behind, say, Japan's. (There have been stories in the recent past about the subway's upgrades, but they have mainly been superficial.)

Not all of you depend on the subway, or fly B-2 bombers, so here's a closer to home example: Windows vs. OS X. The latter is lighter, faster and springier, because it dumped all of the Classic OS's code. A fresh start, with a transition eased by the Classic emulation scheme. Windows Vista, on the other hand, is burdened by 20 years of legacy code, code that it could be argued is essentially obsolete. So we pay the price with a bloated operating system that struggles under its own massive girth. Dumping all that dead weight for Windows 7 and starting fresh—while painful—would be the best thing Microsoft could do. But it's not that easy, or they'd have done it, obviously. Maybe. You got any better examples of painful obsolescence? [IEEE Spectrum, NYT]