About 10 years ago, my school bought a room full of iMacs. Not the slick aluminium ones that you see in Apple stores and living rooms, but the original multi-coloured ones that started the amazing comeback of Apple. Although my students were completely blown over by these beautiful machines, especially around 30 of them all in one room, the excitement soon fizzled when they took out their floppy disks to save and load their work. You see, Apple decided in one simple step to rid most of their computer line of any trace of floppy disks. The iBook and PowerBooks (predecessors of the MacBooks) soon followed suit and Apple had sent a clear message that floppy disks were yesterday’s technology.

That didn’t stop my colleagues or my students from complaining about it. I started a campaign for all students to buy a USB stick, and to make sure they were saving their work. My justification at the time was that a USB stick could hold about 100 times more stuff than a floppy. In the end, Apple were spot on with this move. Before you knew it, Word Documents were too large to fit on a single floppy. Fast forward just a year or two into the future, and a single photo from a half decent camera was too big to fit on a single floppy. The technology was obsolete. That doesn’t mean they aren’t still used – they are. In general though, if somebody approached you with a floppy disk to load a document from, you’d check the year on your calendar quickly to make sure you hadn’t worm-holed it back to 2002.

Now we face a similar move from Apple. With the iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch and MacBook Air, Apple is signaling the end of the CD-ROM. You can still get drives on the MacBooks, the Mini and the iMac ranges. But for how long? I suppose, the biggest tell-tale sign is that Lion is not physically available on a DVD or CD disc. Downloading an entire Operating System from an App Store was way smoother than I thought it was going to be. Although you can burn your downloaded Lion file to a DVD for backup, I have found putting it onto a USB drive was far quicker.

So are you ready to say goodbye to your CD Drive? In the past few years, I have noticed a huge amount of dust gathering on my blank CD’s and DVD’s. With external hard drives and USB sticks so cheap to buy, I haven’t really burned a disc for myself for years. I have though burned music discs for people. I haven’t burned backups of my photos like I used to, so many years ago. But I have created DVD versions of photo slideshows for friends and relatives. So I guess personally I’m not quite ready to let go of my drive just yet. But don’t be surprised if within a few years, we look back at shiny, silver discs as old technology that we used to use…..