Disc-arded

Citation

(2002), "Disc-arded", Work Study, Vol. 51 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/ws.2002.07951baa.005

Disc-arded

Disc-arded

The humble floppy disc will soon be no more. For a long time it has not been a carrier for new software. Now, a number of new PCs do not even have a floppy drive. Yet, I still use one regularly. I know that 1.44Mb is small by today's file sizes but since I work a lot with text, its perfectly adequate. Writing to a floppy is much simpler than "burning" a CD. So, I will hang on while I can – after all there is a large number of people still using typewriters and someone must make ribbons for them, so I should be alright for floppy supplies for a few years yet. This continuation of "older" (mature?) technologies can be exploited for cost saving. At work, we have an ageing telephone switch. The suppliers will stop maintaining it in a year's time. Yet, we have no plans to change it for a more modern one. Why not? Well, it does the job – it will not do some of the things that a modern switch would (such as unified messaging), but we do not need those. So, we have found a third party maintainer that will give us guaranteed continuity of service for five years (although we might change before then). This will save us something like £100,000 per year – not a bad deal. It also gives us time to evaluate fully voice over IP as the emerging technology – by the time we get to the real end of the life of our switch, VoIP may itself be a mature technology – ready for us to adopt it.