As William Gibson put it: "The street finds it's own uses for things."
Back before cell phones, Motorola sold a lot of walkie-talkie type radios. Most of these were 'ruggedized' (encased in big thick yellow/orange rubber padded boot). One day, Motorola engineers came up with a 'better' padded boot they thought would help the radios survive a fall.
But they got complaints from the Air Force. So they investigated..
It turns out that the Air Force mechanics need to 'chalk' their airplanes to track state (bombs loaded, fuel loaded, etc). But the mechanics were always loosing their chalk. So they would just 'scrape' the plane with the (padded) back of their radios, and it would leave a (non-permanent) mark like chalk. The 'improved' padding didn't work the same way, so they asked Motorola to keep selling the old padding (and they did).
(Heard this a long time ago. Really fuzzy on all the details, but I'm sure it's true.)
Back before cell phones, Motorola sold a lot of walkie-talkie type radios. Most of these were 'ruggedized' (encased in big thick yellow/orange rubber padded boot). One day, Motorola engineers came up with a 'better' padded boot they thought would help the radios survive a fall.
But they got complaints from the Air Force. So they investigated..
It turns out that the Air Force mechanics need to 'chalk' their airplanes to track state (bombs loaded, fuel loaded, etc). But the mechanics were always loosing their chalk. So they would just 'scrape' the plane with the (padded) back of their radios, and it would leave a (non-permanent) mark like chalk. The 'improved' padding didn't work the same way, so they asked Motorola to keep selling the old padding (and they did).
(Heard this a long time ago. Really fuzzy on all the details, but I'm sure it's true.)