The Register® — Biting the hand that feeds IT

Feeds

Currys to cease stocking cassettes

Mix-tape romance wiped out by MP3s and teledildonics

Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup/Recovery

The end of the road for cassette tapes has been widely heralded as Currys, the UK high street electrical heayweight, announced today that it will no longer be dealing in the classic storage format.

Woolworths and HMV have already made the move.

Cassettes were something of a cultural icon to many, though perhaps never as beloved as vinyl. It was said to be a common practice in the 1980s for lovestruck young men to woo the objects of their affection by making them compilation tapes, though El Reg has yet to uncover any hard evidence of this (older elements of Vulture Central were at least potentially sexually active during that decade, but a straw poll indicates that strategies based around chocolates and inexpensive sparkling wine were seen as more likely to get a result).

It's always possible that the mix tape was actually more the MySpace of its day - a way for obsessive teenagers to have conversations.

Cassette tapes have seemingly been rendered obsolete by MP3s, the internet, and specialised hardware, just as drug abuse and certain kinds of deviant sex (NSFW) may yet be.

For others, of course, the cassette tape was and always will be primarily remembered as the (relatively) non-volatile storage format of the ZX computer series.

And indeed, predictions of its demise may be a trifle exaggerated. Just because an item can't be bought in Currys, Woolworths or HMV doesn't mean it's gone forever. ®

Agentless Backup is Not a Myth

Latest Comments

Er...

So, what do they expect you to put in your 'Matsui CD35P Personal Portable CD Radio Cassette' (item no. 767552 on their website) then..?

0
0

Currys sold tapes?

Thought they only sold washing machines and Amigas, whatever is the world coming to..

..damn new fangled shiny disk thing won't stay put on my gramophone..

(ps I lived in the time of Vinyl and it doesn't sound 'warm', it sounds scratchy and always has - and tapes have had it coming for a long time, name one person that doesn't have a shoe box filled with eaten silly string some cassette player has chewed its way thru - death to tapes hurrah)

0
0
Anonymous Coward

X-Ray Spex

"C30, C60, C 90 -- gone?

(apologies to old X-Ray Specs fans)"

Surely you mean "old Bow Wow Wow fans" - and if ever there was a band that appealed to old men, it was Bow Wow Wow.

I wonder when Minidisc will give up the ghost. I can think of a few reasons to keep it around, but not enough to ensure a continued presence in the high street.

0
0

More from The Register

SCO vs. IBM battle resumes over ownership of Unix
Zombie lawsuit back and wants to suck the brains out of Linux
 breaking news
You don't need phone lines or cable for ANYTHING, says Dish
The satellite-dish man can sort you out with phone and broadband over the air too
 breaking news
What's HP got under wraps? Looks awfully flash and tape shaped
What happens in Vegas won't stay there - we've got the details
AMD lifts the veil on Opteron, ARM chip plans for 2014
Not much action going on in 2013, though
Microsoft borks botnet takedown in Citadel snafu
Stupid Redmond kicked over our honeypots, wail white hats
IBM's $1bn layoffs latest: Now axe swings in US, Canada - reports
Union claims 121 storage bods canned after dismal sales
NetApp musters muscular cluster bluster for ONTAP busters
Storage array OS overhauled to juggle more nodes, go down on you, er, less
HP adds 'Haswell' Xeon E3s to entry ProLiant servers
Gussies up MicroServer for SMBs, adds baby switches