The Standard Group Plc is a multi-media organization with investments in media
platforms spanning newspaper print
operations, television, radio broadcasting, digital and online services. The
Standard Group is recognized as a
leading multi-media house in Kenya with a key influence in matters of national and
international interest.
Probably the pencil sharpener is among the only item that has remained the same over the last dozen years or so. No clever inventors have emerged to ‘improve’ the pencil sharpener.
Not so in the computer world, since slightly less than 15 years ago, the floppy disk, also called the diskette, reigned supreme.
Users of the current fashionable flash disks would consider diskettes relics of a Dodo era, but back in the day, it was the ultimate data storage device, comprising a disk of thin and flexible magnetic storage sealed in rectangular plastic.
But the diskette, a 1970s invention of IBM , had many challenges: Inge kwama and thus could not open and you had no recourse, but to try knocking it on your palm to shake off dust.
Flash disks come in all manner of shapes - resembling cars, weapons and pets. But the diskette had no such leeway in design. It was the size of one slice of boflo! and hence pocketing several led to bulging pockets that could have interested guys in security.
To track its content meant sticking an adhesive stickers indicating whether what was stored in there was ‘matumbo prices’ or ‘bad debts.’
Diskettes had limited storage and since early 2000s, were replaced by first by CDs and DVDs, before the advent of the current memory cards, flash disks and external hard drives, which can store anything from music, movies to the entire Kenya Year Book.
