| For 20 years, personal computing has relied on the diskette, from the 8-inch to the 5.25-inch to the current 3.5-inch, for saving files and installing software. Now, thanks to wireless and online services and the CD, the diskette may soon disappear.
The first death knell was sounded back in 1998, when Apple introduced its iMac without a disk drive. Office workers tend to rely on local area networks for file transfers, while home users send files over the Internet or use rewritable CD-ROMs. And now that six-gigabyte hard drives are not uncommon, using disks for backup storage simply is not feasible.
Some analysts predict that it’s not just diskettes that are on their way out. Terry Retter, a director of the PricewaterhouseCoopers Technology Centre, hypothesizes that “the [traditional] computer may even disappear into the infrastructure of the other technology networks.” Almost certain is that personal computers will increasingly be supplanted as Internet-access devices by such wireless technology as Web-enabled cell phones and Palm Pilots. The wireless messaging market is expected to skyrocket from 17 million users in 1998 to 106 million in 2003. |
