Martin Schneider of the website "Dangerous Minds" reviews a series of pre-recorded outgoing messages made by Radio Shack in the 1980s when home answering machines first cropped up.

Their promoter called them "Phonies" — recordings of impersonators for people to use as outgoing messages.

After the Beep A new compilation of old answering machine tapes reveal what we talk about when we talk to machines.

A fan of Phil Hartman just released four answering machine messages that the late comedy genius recorded for him in 1993.