Looking around my office, I’m struck by the tech things no longer needed, as well as those that are now essential.

No longer needed:

• Floppy disks – When is the last time you needed a floppy? To build a boot disk?
• Mouse pads – Ah, all those funky mouse pads that helped users show their individuality and gave companies another useful give-away that would keep its brand in front of users. Optical mouses have made them useful as potted plant coasters, and not much else.
• AltaVista search – AltaVista was the first powerhouse search engine; even after HotBot came along and did better search, more power users leveraged AltaVista (weenie users were all about Yahoo!). Then came Google, and the world changed. AltaVista is now an Overture product.
• CRTs – Yes, the cathode-ray tubes have given way to flat screens in a big way. The flat screens weigh less, have better resolution, use less power, have a smaller footprint and have more features (landscape/portrait; speakers; inputs for more than one computer). And the cost is not crazy. What’s the downside to this trend?
• Computer books (for techies) – I have a huge collection of computer books – I used to love them. I’d use them as references. I’d get to a point in programming where I couldn’t remember/simply didn’t know how to, for example, get the length of a string in some language. I’d hit the book. Now, I hit the web. I can’t remember the last computer book I’ve purchased, but it’s been over two years, that’s for certain.
• Zip drives – For years, they ruled as the fast, simple way to move large files around in a sneaker-net way. Now, with fast connections everywhere, USB thumb drives and services like Gmail, which replaces FTP with simple e-mail, Zip drives are a thing of the past. I have a couple here at home – in computers/attached as external drive – I have not used in years.

Essential (or – at the very least – very common):

• Wireless connectivity.
• Tabbed browsing – Even Microsoft has embraced this model (after people saw Firefox and embraced same).
• Social Networking – With MySpace, FaceBook, Friendster and all the other knock-offs, it’s getting more and more difficult to find people who don’t have a page on one of these sites. Good or bad, this is the way things are today.
• iTunes – I hope this doesn’t need any explanation.
• Big, honkin’ hard drives – We store music, images from digital cameras, video and more on our drives. My first hard drive was 20 meg. My current drive is 250 gig – and in a RAID (two 250 gig drives; mirrored for redundancy).

In the future, I expect (hope!) more wires to disappear (Bluetooth/wireless chips), as well as more intelligent backup solutions (pretty much all today are not “can your mom use it?” ready).

But the most fun will be the stuff you really didn’t expect, like iTunes and flat screens. Let’s see what tomorrow brings!