Another one bites the dust

I may have been barely into the teens when my father's friend visited us from America. And one of the things he brought with him impressed me a whole lot: the Polaroid camera. It was sheer magic--to take a photo, and less than a minute later was the photo in our hands. We are now so much used to newer and newer gizmo every day that we are no longer awed as we were just a couple of decades ago :-(

Well, that Polaroid era is coming to an end. Excerpt:
Polaroid has now stopped making its instant film and expects supplies to run out completely in 2009. While the organization stopped manufacturing commercial type cameras almost two years ago, the slow realization that film photography has had its day will come as little consolation to the company’s global workforce. Factories will close in Massachusetts, Mexico, and the Netherlands, leaving a core staff of about 150 employees at its headquarters at Concord, California. At the height if its powers, in the 1970s, the company employed over 20,000 workers. The decision to stop production was “due to dramatic technological changes in the photographic industry,” said the company, “which will see the organization transitioning from its analog instant film business into new and innovative digital instant photography technologies.”