Monday, January 10, 2005

Tomorrow's Obsolescence Today!

Here I am at my new location (same company, different division), which I started last week. It's an office where a lot of other division are being crammed in as they prepare to move to a new corporate HQ and continue the shakeout from a recent merger.

But anyway, there's a trash bin not too far from my new desk here plenty of stuff has been disposed of following moves by many personnel. Last week, what should I find in there but a Zip drive and Jaz drive and many disks to go with them!

It's no surprise to most of you that most Iomega products are pretty much out the door. We used to get Zip disks from our clients, so our Macs were made to order with Zip drives in 'em already. But no one's sent us a Zip in years. Of course it's now a CD-R, or a big file drop to our FTP server. Zip drives were an indespensible part of the computer landscape for probably no more than five years.

The reason, of course, is that Zip disks NEVER went down in price. For as long as I've been aware of them, it was considered a bargain to get them in quantity at under $10 apiece. Compare that to CD-R's, which went from a coupla bucks to about a quarter each in spindles. and now even DVD+R disks are well under a buck. That's 45 Gb worth of storage for the price of one 100 mb Zip disk.


But of course the other thing mitigating against the two units I found in the trash was that they were also SCSI drives. Hey kids, remember SCSI?

But I'm not proud. No sense messing with the drives, but I still will need some quick backups. I promise I'll blank out those disks.