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. ®

Related stories

• Currys price promise refusal backed by High Court (19 December 2006)
• Currys brings solar panels to the High Street (31 July 2006)
• Dixons ditches the video recorder (22 November 2004)