Sponsor's Message

But what about all the cool inventions, gadgets and devices from yester-year which have been rendered extinct by the inexorable advance of technology? Who gives a thought to them?

Go back less than 30 years and the big-thing for data-storage at a microcomputer level was the good old cassette player and interface. By plugging your audio recorder into the side of your TRS80, Apple or other desktop microcomputer, you could save and load programs and data -- if you were lucky.

Now have your say Got something to say about today's column, or want to see what others think?  Visit The Forums While you're here, why not visit the Aardvark Hall of Shame and perhaps make your own nomination.

I say "if you were lucky" because as often as not, you'd wait for inexorably long periods of time, only to have the computer display a terse message advising that the transfer had failed -- and you'd have to start all over again.

Then came a wonderful invention -- the 5.25" floppy disk!

Woo-hoo! Cassette tapes for data storage were suddenly consigned to the tech-scrapheap and floppies were all the rage.

The floppy evolved slowly (starting with an 8" 128Kbyte unit right through to the 2.88MB 3.5" unit that never really caught on. The ultimate extension of the floppy was the Zip disk -- a floppy that carried up to 100MB of data but which brought back those "fingers crossed" days of cassette tape storage when you prayed that you weren't hit by the infamous "click of death".

Now floppies are virtually dead and we've switched to either USB flash memory or optical disks like CDR, CDRW and DVDR/RW. Yes, advancing technology has killed off another one of yesterday's wonder-devices.

Just like the word-processor killed the carbon-paper industry, the relentless advance of technology is also killing off some of its older progeny.

Digital cameras are in the process of killing film (despite what the photophiles might claim -- it's only a matter of time), CDs have killed vinyl (despite what the audiophiles might claim) and now the iPod along with Net-based downloads look set to kill off the audio CD.

But if we look forward another 10 or 20 years, what everyday devices that we now treasure and rely on will have also been relegated to the junkyard?

Will we still have mobile phones as we now know them? Will the CRT finally be dead, replaced by OLEDs, electronic paper or some other technology?

Will our cars be fossil-fuel free, powered instead by electricity, the sun's rays, or maybe even by using ten of those magnetic fuel savers all connected in series :-)

Let's see how good you are...

Roll out your own predictions and forecasts. Aardvark has been publishing for 10 years already and it might be nice, in another 10 years' time, to look back and see how accurate its readers are in using their crystal balls.

Go have your say in The Aardvark Forums

If you feel that this is a good thing and/or you hold a "geniune affection" for yours truly -- then you are welcome to gift me some money using the buttons provided. In gifting this money you accept that no goods, service or other consideration is offered, provided, accepted or anticipated in return. Just click on the button to gift whatever you can afford. NOTE: PayPal bills in US dollars so don't accidentally gift more than what you were intending :-)

Contacting Aardvark
I'm always happy to hear from readers, whether they're delivering brickbats, bouquets or news tip-offs. If you'd like to contact me directly, please this form. If you're happy for me to republish your comments then please be sure and select For Publication.

Other media organisations seeking more information or republication rights are also invited to contact me.

Just add a couple of lines of JavaScript to your pages and you can get a free summary of Aardvark's daily commentary -- automatically updated each and every week-day.

Aardvark also makes a summary of this daily column available via XML using the RSS format. More details can be found here.

Contact me if you decide to use either of these feeds and have any problems.

Linking Policy
Want to link to this site? Check out Aardvark's Linking Policy.

Did you tell someone else about Aardvark today? If not then do it now!