the American automotive industry would never have gotten off the ground.

and way outbid them.

sort of sarcasm...

One can of course resort to the literal: doing an obsolete job/making an obsolete product. Ah the youth of today. (If only I could be one.)

Just wondering why horse whips were called buggy whips.

My dad had the same black Bell Telephone rotary dial on his home office desk until the mid '80s. I just upgraded my iPhone from a 3 to a 5, but right before I did my son's 20 year old gf saw me using the 3 and said "is that an iPhone 3? How retro!"

Yes, we also have some wireless ones, but that's our go-to in a power outage.

You could KILL someone with one of those--I mean, beat them down and to death. This is not something I would recommend, of course, but the point I am trying to convey is that they are very heavy, very sturdy, very solidly constructed items.

made to last, not be replaced every year.

My dad's had one of those 30' handset extension cords and he would walk around while talking and invariably the reciever would get dragged of the desk and crash to the floor. Kept on working like nothing happened.

Modem salesman

Google wave sysadmin

Kids these days.

This was the late 90's and I assumed it was a standard expression of obsolete tech.
We had admins complaining that some people would stumble onto it out of context and think "Buggy Whip Manufacturing" was a real program. Others had no idea of the reference.

a bunch of kids were painting the iron fence. I said, "Don't trick anyone else into painting it for you." Got a few giggles, but don't know if they got the joke.

For using racist language. Sad but true.

But I've never heard the phrase "buggy whip maker" in my life.

Soon after the turn of the last century, he converted his shop into a garage for automobiles, and was able to stay in business an additional 20 to 30 years or so.

There are still garages around here that advertise what they did in the past, one up the street from me has a mural on the side of its building that depicts what they did in the 1890s or so, repairing wagons and horse drawn carriages. Oddly enough, in many cases, it seems like the tools were mostly the same, at least at first. Probably no surprise given that some of the first automobiles were literally horseless carriages, built on the chassis of carriages still pulled by horses.