UK electronics retailer Currys recently announced that it is to stop selling audio cassette tapes.
The venerable cassette tape (also know as the compact cassette) was introduced into the UK back in the early 1960s, with sales of this highly accessible media format reaching their peak in Britain around 1990, when some 90 million units were sold. Driven by sales of Walkmans, cheap consumer tape decks, in-car stereos, and an open licensing policy from Philips (the medium’s originator and primary advocate), the humble cassette tape was the first real electronic storage medium to gain mass adoption.
However, while most people used the cassette tape to record radio chart shows, vinyl albums, and those infamous ‘mix tapes,’ the medium was also used to store computer applications and data. Indeed, the original IBM PC had a cassette port and a command in its ROM Basic programming language to use it. Although data rates were slow in comparison to today’s peripherals, the use of modulation techniques similar to those used by modems meant that tens of megabytes of data could be stored on a single cassette – useful for backing up standalone PCs.
Today’s younger generation may have never stored data on spinning bits of magnetic-coated plastic, and so CDs and DVDs are the only spinning discs they know of. They are, however, au fait with all manner of flash memory-based storage devices, such as USB memory sticks, and memory cards (CompactFlash, SmartMedia, MMC, Memory Stick, Secure Digital, and xD). How soon will these go out of fashion? Three years? Five years? Much sooner than we think is the answer.
Compared to cassette tape or the venerable floppy disk, today’s end-user storage media will have a relatively short shelf-life, and so organizations and individuals are risking data lock-out if they fail to manage their archives and removable storage media accordingly.
Source: OpinionWire by Butler Group (www.butlergroup.com)
