Hark back to 1973 when Concorde production began and they had around 120 advance orders/options. Most of which evaporated because of not only the oil shock but,

Hark back to 1973 when Concorde production began and they had around 120 advance orders/options. Most of which evaporated because of not only the oil shock but, significantly, the discovery that the Boeing 747 (and other wide-bodies) could make huge amounts of revenue by carrying more passengers, cheaper. The 747 was originally expected to be a cargo freighter, once SSTs like Concorde ate the passenger market in the 80s, hence the high cockpit positioned over the nose door on the cargo variants. Concorde was the last gasp of the idea that air travel was a very expensive form of transport for the elite, who would pay to save time over taking an ocean liner. Instead we got the democratization of air travel. It's no accident that the cruise liner died out as a normal form of international transport (as opposed to a recreational vehicle) at the same time that wide-body airliners caught on. (Side-note: the plans for Concorde B are worth googling — an incremental upgrade with quieter engines and a range that could have stretched to 5000 miles, opening up a bunch more routes, and due to enter production by 1982.) Graffiti: I used it and I don't miss it! While early on-screen multitouch keyboards sucked, what really makes Graffiti show its age is modern gesture-based systems like Swype or SwiftKey, where each word is a unique ideogram composed by dragging a finger across a QWERTY map in letter order. Graffiti typically took 2-3 gestures to enter a letter: with Swype I'm typically on 5-7 gestures per word, which overall is much faster (average word length in English is 5.5 letters). Graffiti has in fact been ported to iOS and Android ... but relatively few people use it because times have moved on.