The Queen at 90: 9 technologies she's seen come and go, from floppy disks to VHS

Game Boys, pagers and PDAs have also come and gone during the Queen's lifetime

The Queen is turning 90. Well, she celebrated her actual birthday in April but her 'official' birthday is this Saturday, 11 June. Confused? Best not to worry about these matters. Let the nobles take care of it.

The Queen's turning 90 comes some nine months after she became Britain's longest-reigning monarch. Not bad going at all.

All this got V3 thinking about Her Majesty's long and glorious reign, and life, and some of technologies she has outlived and outlasted, particularly since she became queen in 1952, which broadly mirrors the birth of the tech era.

So we put together a little list of some of the tech that has been and gone in that time.

9. The floppy disk

The unfortunately named floppy disk was invented by IBM's Alan Shugart in 1967 as an affordable and portable data storage device.

The first floppy drives took 8in disks, which soon shrunk to 5.25in. Sony launched the first 3.5in floppy in 1981, which is the device the majority of us will remember. It became a necessary tool for sharing and transferring files between computers for nearly three decades, traditionally having 1.44MB of storage.

However, file sizes grew and most manufacturers had stopped producing floppy disks by the late 1990s. Apple was the first to shun the technology, producing the first iMac in 1998 without support for the floppy disk, and the storage device was soon consigned to the history books.

Except as the save icon, where it is so well known that it seems unlikely ever to be replaced.

The Queen at 90: 9 technologies she's seen come and go, from floppy disks to VHS

Game Boys, pagers and PDAs have also come and gone during the Queen's lifetime

8. Analogue TV and Teletext services

When the Queen ascended to the throne in 1952 the ceremony was broadcast in black and white and on the only TV channel that existed: the redoubtable BBC1. Since then TV has changed beyond all recognition to the point where analogue services no longer even exist in most of the UK.

Now, those watching coverage of the Queen's 90th can do so on 50in high-definition plasma screens complete with pause, rewind and record functions and access to hundreds of channels.

The BBC ended its final analogue transmissions in 2012 , which meant that anyone without a digital aerial lost their services, while the long-running Ceefax, the BBC's Teletext tool, was also switched off. Although Teletext Holidays is still going.

The Queen at 90: 9 technologies she's seen come and go, from floppy disks to VHS

Game Boys, pagers and PDAs have also come and gone during the Queen's lifetime

7. The Game Boy

The Game Boy looks laughable in our iPhone-iPad-HD-3D all-singing, all-dancing world. It's a huge brick of a thing with a terrible 8-bit screen that required you to insert cartridges and then bash away at a little D-pad and two buttons to play games.

But in its heyday the Game Boy was the portable device of its generation. Perfect to keep children entertained on long car journeys, it was no doubt the saviour of many parents, while for gamers it offered a chance to play on the move, a real rarity when it was launched in 1989.

However, its popularity could never survive the onslaught of the mobile phone, which provided games like Snake built in, and the advance of other portable gaming units. Nintendo saw the writing on the wall and ended production of the unit in 2003.

Whether Prince William and Harry were given one by their grandmother is lost to history. Unless she tells us. Paging Her Majesty ...

The Queen at 90: 9 technologies she's seen come and go, from floppy disks to VHS

Game Boys, pagers and PDAs have also come and gone during the Queen's lifetime

6. Pagers

Pagers had a short but sweet life. The device is synonymous with the mid-1990s when 'paging' took hold. Using a telephone, one person would send a message to the pager belonging to the person they wanted to talk to. The message would then show up on the pager's LCD screen.

Motorola was largely responsible for the growth of pagers through the decade, and general estimates suggest that there were over 60 million in use by 1994.

But pagers have become near extinct with the growth of mobile phones and email. They are still used by some medical professionals in some hospitals where cellular coverage is poor and radio transmitters would interfere with medical equipment. However, seeing a pager in the wild is a pretty rare sight.

The Queen at 90: 9 technologies she's seen come and go, from floppy disks to VHS

Game Boys, pagers and PDAs have also come and gone during the Queen's lifetime

5. Huge CRT TVs

Nowadays even the cheapest, bog-standard flat-screen device won't take up too much space in your living room regardless of the size.

But for many years big TVs were enormous boxes that dominated the room and had to be placed on dedicated stands or huge chests or cabinets.

Over the years the likes of LG, Samsung, Sony have managed to make TV tech big, thin and brilliant, so that for just a few hundred quid you can get something you're proud to watch box sets on.

Maybe the Queen will see Apple enter this market too.

The Queen at 90: 9 technologies she's seen come and go, from floppy disks to VHS

Game Boys, pagers and PDAs have also come and gone during the Queen's lifetime

4. PDAs

The PDA can arguably be traced to back to the Organiser family of devices from UK firm Psion, which originally appeared in the mid-1980s as a calculator-like pocket computer.

Later Psion models adopted a clamshell 'spectacle case' design with a small Qwerty keyboard, and included a calendar, word processor, spreadsheet, database and even a programming environment.

However, the term 'PDA' (personal digital assistant) was actually coined by Apple for its ill-fated Newton device in 1992.

The most successful PDAs were the Palm models of the late 1990s and early 2000s, which had a stylus-driven touch-screen instead of a keyboard and proved popular because of their relatively low cost and the number of third-party applications available for them.

However, the writing was on the wall for the PDA when Nokia introduced its Communicator models that blended phone functions. Today, smartphones fulfil most of the functions of a PDA, and a lot more.

The Queen at 90: 9 technologies she's seen come and go, from floppy disks to VHS

Game Boys, pagers and PDAs have also come and gone during the Queen's lifetime

3. Telegrams

Telegrams used to be a very common way to send information around the country, as dots and dashes communicated information quickly over long distances.

Now, of course, the technology is all but redundant in the UK. Even the Queen now sends letters to people on their 100th birthday, rather than the more romantic-sounding telegram.

The Queen at 90: 9 technologies she's seen come and go, from floppy disks to VHS

Game Boys, pagers and PDAs have also come and gone during the Queen's lifetime

2. VHS tapes

Remember the days of fiddling about with videotape recorders? Trying to set them up to record your favourite show, only to realise you had it set on the wrong channel, or accidental taped over your wedding day video with a repeat of Men Behaving Badly?

Thankfully the rise of TV services like Sky+ and TiVo has consigned these days to a distant memory, a story to tell the grandchildren that they'll never believe. But for many years, the VCR was the only way to watch a programme that you missed.

VHS was launched in the 1970s, and went head-to-head with Betamax for video dominance, before eventually becoming the winner. But it was all but redundant by the late 2000s as DVDs, CDs and cable TV services came into being that were far more efficient.

The Queen at 90: 9 technologies she's seen come and go, from floppy disks to VHS

Game Boys, pagers and PDAs have also come and gone during the Queen's lifetime

1. CDs, tapes, Walkmans, Mini-Discs ...

Compact cassettes and Walkmans were born in the latter half of the last century but they are now seen as a bygone era of portable music as iPods and smartphones have taken over.

The cassette, or tape, became one of the most popular ways to listen to music in the early 1970s, alongside the LP record. It was only when Sony launched the Walkman in 1979 that cassettes really started overtaking vinyl.

The 1980s were the beginning of portable music, and in the decades that followed research and development was focused on making the mobile music experience shock-proof and less reliant on batteries.

Cassettes were overtaken by CDs in the 1990s, and Walkmans were superseded by portable CD players. Now, 20 years later, CDs are fast declining in numbers, as are the shops that sell them.

CD players are virtually extinct, as even if people do choose to buy CDs they still then generally choose to use an MP3 player for on-the-go listening.

The Queen, who no doubt also enjoyed gramophones in her childhood, has seen them all come and go, to be replaced by cloud streaming services headed by Spotify and Apple Music.