Breaking Bad...Technology

Hi there. Nora here. The other day, I was putting away my pasta machine. It's a manual device that's probably about 15 years old by now. It has a C clamp that lets you attach the machine to the kitchen table. You insert the handle into the side of it, feed your pasta dough in, and turn the crank to extrude thinner sheets of pasta. It works really well!

The fact that it works really well got me thinking, though. From the point of view of the digital economy, that pasta machine is nuts! You make a thing that's good quality, sell it, and then that's it. People just...use it, probably for decades. What kind of business model is that? You don't have to get a new operating system for the pasta machine that requires buying new memory for it? There isn't a proprietary type of dough you need to purchase separately because no other type of dough works with the machine? Like I said, nuts.

It just seems that so much of what we use in digital culture is not only quickly dated or obsolete, but also tethered, keeping us in a perpetual bad marriage with tech companies.

So, my question is: what tool or device do you have that, like my pasta machine, might well outlive you? Why did you get it and what makes it so great? Leave us a comment below!

UPDATE: Check out the cool pics of great tools folks in the Spark community have sent us here.