Relevance of Analog Technology i.e interoperability

As the world moves from analog to digital technology it might come as a surprise when the analog technology sometimes enables features that are not possible in digital. An example is books on tape (yes the soon to be obsolete cassette tape). Interestingly, the analog version has the bookmark feature inherently built into it versus a CD for example. So I can stop the tape at any time and the tape keeps the state information of where I had stopped last. This feature is obviously not available in a CD.

Another example to illustrate the point is the extremely ingenious cassette player adapter. With the explosion of use of digital mp3 players, there has been a technology gap between the players and enabling their use inside cars. The cassette player adapter is this cassette with a jack that can be hooked into your mp3 player. It bridges the gap between the explosion of storage in mp3 players and the old school car stereo. And the enabler here is analog again. It is the way analog technology works in this case.
"The coil of wire you wound around the cassette pins is an inductor. When energy from your CD player's output is fed into the coil, a magnetic field is generated. The energy in the coil corresponds to the energy coming out of the CD player's audio output and it is picked up by the cassette player's playback head without even touching the coil. It doesn't have to touch because the magnetic field is big enough to encompass the tape head."

Now here is a scenario where analog technology surpasses digital technology (i.e CD in this case) in being able to interoperate with a new technology (digital mp3 players). Such interoperability, specially one without design or a standard body is unimaginable in the software world.