DVD is the future of storage. I know it is, Creative told me so. It holds up to 17 gigabytes and can play movies, audio, programs and just about anything you want. So why do I still have this strange feeling of dé·jà vu when I'm told I can throw away my old CD-ROM drive, I wont need it any more.

I remember when I bought my first CD-ROM drive, a Creative 2x speed, the store salesman declared "You can throw out your floppy drive now, you wont need it, not now that we have CDs, they can hold hundreds of megabytes of data and they're so easy."

He forgot about the one vital flaw with CD-ROM (and now DVD-ROM), it's read-only. You can't go back to your latest graphic, tweak the colours, save it, check it, add a few little touches, save it again and so on.

Yes I know we now have CD-writers, Minidiscs, tape drives, Zip drives, Jaz drives, Superdisks and a myriad of other storage solutions, but they still aren't good enough.

Why? Have you noticed you still have a 3.5" floppy drive? They seem absolutely useless in these days of the CD games and 20Mb graphic files. The reason we still have them is because we still don’t have any other device which is random access, fast, relatively affordable, and most importantly standardised.

I have a Superdisk drive, It's fantastic, it acts just like a floppy disk but it has 120 megs of space, the only problem is my friend has a zip drive and my other friend has a tape drive. We still transfer most of our stuff using floppies.

This shows a changing face in the computer industry. We don't just have two companies bringing out a new standard, eventually ending up with one making a mint, while the other retreats to lick it's wounds and make a new standard, that was hard enough on the consumer who opted for the wrong brand.

Now we have four or five companies all bringing out their products at the same time, all teaming up with other large companies to try to push their product down the weary consumer's mouth.

No one loses, there is such a boom in this industry that you could capture just 2% of the market and you'd still be raking in the cash.

There is such confusion in the consumer market that standards are becoming harder and harder to find.

The DVD market is fairly lucky in this respect, it wouldn't have been surprising to see a few major manufacturers teaming up and creating their own "superior" high capacity CD standard. Suddenly you've got half of the store wall selling DVDs and the other half selling SCDs or some other stylish acronym.

Of course we all know if that happened it could only end in tears.

DVD has had it's fair share of problems (DIVX, that lovable region system, almost a complete absence of DVD-ROM titles), and we still don't have anything as versatile and standardised as a floppy, but DVD should make for one of the most interesting and fun technologies to follow in the coming years.

Tully Rosen