Things that've disappeared the past decade

VIDEO tapes, fax machines and the Encyclopaedia Britannica are among the items to have disappeared from our lives over the past decade.

VIDEO tapes, fax machines and the Encyclopaedia Britannica are among the items to have disappeared from our lives over the past decade.

No corner of our lives has been left untouched by the internet as households across Australia went online.

Since 1998, home internet access has more than quadrupled from 16 per cent to 72 per cent, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

Renowned reference books such as Encyclopaedia Britannica and World Book seemed to disappear as they were usurped first by Microsoft Encarta and then the far less reliable Wikipedia. Video tapes became a relic in the 2000s, with DVD players outselling video recorders early in the decade. The massive retail video libraries of the past also moved on, selling their old wares for $1 a tape and then filling the shelves with fast-moving DVDs.

Fax machines were made obsolete by scanners and email, and by this year your Filofax fitted in your mobile phone. Many CD collections were condensed on to a tiny MP3 player.

Film cameras have all but disappeared, as did the trip to the chemist to get film developed.

Your camcorder also went digital, and eventually merged into your camera or telephone or both.

Public telephones slowly disappeared as even children are now able to whip out their mobiles.

Nowadays, 31 per cent -- or 841,000 -- of all children aged between five and 14 have access to their own mobile phones, the ABS estimates.

The Yellow Pages has become a thing of the past for many.

And the way we use computers also changed. Floppy disks, which were a mere 3.5 inches (9cm) wide in 2000, were usurped by zip drives, CDs and finally the USB flash drive.

The squeals and delays of dial-up internet are also on the way out, as households move to high-speed broadband connections.

The steady stream of catalogues stuffed in mailboxes slowed to a trickle in the 2000s, and the floodgates of spam email opened. Suddenly, it seemed, everyone knew an exiled Nigerian prince.

Australia began generating spam too. By 2004, Australia was the world's 10th-largest spam producer, accounting for 1.21 per cent of global unsolicited commercial emails.

Finding your way was revolutionised by the explosion in GPS navigation. Driving while balancing an open street directory on your lap was made a thing of the past this decade.