A year and a half ago I wrote about it: Adios, Optical Disc. As I predicted in that post, the optical drive is now absent from all Apple computers. They lead the way, and eventually the PC will follow suit.
The only time you really need an optical disc these days is to burn music from your old CD collection. In fact, I recommend that you buy music on CDs and do just that: Burn the CD to make a digital copy, but retain the CD as a backup. People who follow this advice will be thankful in the future, just in case those online music repositories eventually die off, which they will.
As the optical disc rides into that optical sunset, and as I’m revising some of my perennial books, I’ve come to notice a comparison between the downfall of the optical disc and the earlier demise of the floppy disk. The similarities are oddly familiar.
I’ll use my book PCs For Dummies for comparison between the ancient floppy disk and the optical disk.
Both types of disk once featured a full chapter in the book. The chapter was divided into two parts: Identifying the disk and formatting or using.
Identifying the disk was a big deal: With both floppies and CD/DVDs, multiple formats existed. The reason? Evolution. Over time, different formats were developed to squeeze more capacity out of the disk without changing its size. The result was a morass of nomenclature to describe something few people had the time to learn or deal with.
Anyone similarity: Where once I would have lying around stacks and stacks of floppy disks I now have spools and spools of optical discs.
I once had the stacks (rubber-banded together) of the 5 1/4-inch floppies. Then came the 3 1/2-inch diskettes. I must have had hundreds of those laying around. That collection impressed me because when I first started a floppy disk drive the disks retailed for about $8 each.
Simile to floppies, when CD-R discs came out they cost about $5 each and you purchased them one at a time or in packs of 5. Eventually the cost dropped through the floor — just like floppies.
At some point in time, I purged my old floppy disk collection, probably when I moved out of my old place. I guess I’ll toss out my CD-R / DVD-R / DVD-RW / etc. collection when I make my next move, which might not be for some time.
Here’s my question: Will the SD card, which seems to have inherited the removable media crown, be next? And what will supplant the SD card?
Ahh floppy Disk’s 1.44MB (or 720K) I used them through out my Schooling (mind you at University they were a little small) as such they got things backed up to them. Now if I need the back up it a case of finding the USB disk drive! The USB key or Flash drive has seen off that thing (If I dig enough hard enough I will find a 128K memory stick!) As memory density increases (I heard this week about a Micron/Intel memory that while not fast is near permenant and will out perform SD) I think the USB means of accessing will out do and the memory key is here to stay as I am not aware of any cap on size from the USB Spec.
Comment by glennp — August 28, 2015 @ 4:06 am
And that’s it’s key to success: As long as they can keep increasing capacity without changing the size, the memory/storage format will stick around. Thumb drives and SD Cards will be around for some time.
Comment by admin — August 28, 2015 @ 7:19 am