Back in the days of prmitive man and ancient ways, as far back even as the 1970,'s or 80's when civilization was not so SMART one might see these strange devices in offices upon the desks of executives. This sharp pointed pokey metal device was welded to a round heavy base to hold it in place on a desk.
It was not a form of weaponry but a receptical for data processing. An early type of data center for holding all the messaging and communications that passed between people.
Actually it was something more like the delete button or trash folder we are familiar with today.
Before the advanced age of talking tech most human populations still used pen and paper as a form of messaging.
A thing called a message pad was very common. It worked in a rather simplistic way of sending and receiving. Telephones were used in these times but were not so SMART as to send videos or happy faces. Back then one person just spoke to another person through a wired telephone device. If no one was around to answer the phone it would just ring and ring and ring until the caller hung up. If two people were talking on the phone and someone else tried to call the person's phone number the call would not go through, instead a busy signal was heard by the caller... bzzz bzzz bzzz bzzz, and you would have to keep calling back until the busy signal turned to a ring.
Sometimes if a person got tired of the phone ringing they just took it off the hook for a while.
In offices there was usually receptionist. This person had the job of answering the phone and greeting people that came in. Little pads of paper were kept at the receptionist's desk to take messages for the other people in the office who were not available. The paper message would then get placed on the desk of the person who it was for, or put in a message cubby, little labled box spaces for people in the office.
The little spikey device
was used to keep the messages for a while after they were read just in case it was necessary to find the name or phone number again. Eventually someone would go through the spikey holder and delete old messages to the trash.
In time this system faded out because a new fangled device called an answering machine was invented. It was a tape recorder that answered the telephone, played a hello message to the caller, and then recorded a response message from the caller. This was the beginning of the era of people not actually talking to each other as much, they could just use the message machine to communicate with or ignore each other.
When I finally got an answering machine one of the first messages recorded was from my dad saying " I'm not going to tallk to some bleep! bleep! answering machine. Eventually he did.
Now we simply talk the phone.
Pen and paper do still exist but typewriters, answering machines, answering services, wired telephones, phone booths, telephone operators, telegraph machines, fax machines, desk calculators, etc, are now found in antique stores or vintage memorabilia.
What will go extinct in the next decades?
Humans?
In ancient days before tele phones and tele vision there was
telepathy
