Bubble memory devices

Hi, Whilst waiting for a video to download (I'm still on dial-up) I decided to have a flick through an issue of 80 Microcomputing. It's issue 10 (October 1980) and inlcudes an article about the row about whether the US government and/or patent office should honour copyrights for computer software. Anyway, on page 46 I stumbled across an interesting article (called "A Slow Road To Bubble Memories") about bubble memory. The main bubble memory manufacturers of the time were Intel Corp., Texas Instruments and Rockwell Int. The article also mentions that Rockwell had a bubble system, a 256K bit board, available for $1,800. Meanwhile Intel had a bubble system in kit form - 7110-1 Magnetic Memory board came with all control and support circuitry - and sold for $2,000. What happened to bubble memory? Did it die out due to the costs, or did people prefer to use cassettes, disks etc. instead? Regards, Andrew B aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk