Bill,

Although in this time of rapid change in technology your perception is popular, it does not have a basis in reality. Please consider you can pick up a cell phone connected through a micro-wave network and call a phone number in a Vermont village that has the same telephone wiring for the better part of a century, and they can call you. I still have in my collection some of the first music CD's issued over 30 years ago and play them with a new Mac G5 or with the DVD player that's part of an HD digital TV system.

The Sony/Phillips CD system as invented was done on the basis of establishing an international standard designed to be backward compatible. The standard is like an inverted pyramid, every new device is built on the principle of the first CD that has since been added to and elaborated while remaining fully compatible with the first part of the standard.

Computer technology is similarly based on international standards of how digital data is stored. I can plug a USB floppy drive into a new Mac and read files made 15 years ago on an IBM clone as long as those files are in one of the international standard formats.

What you imagine the consequences of obsolescence could be in the future was taken into account by scientists and engineers a long time ago and all recent and new developments these days incorporate an essential core of backward compatibility.