Did anyone have Iomega Zip drives where they studied/worked/lived?
Where I was it went from 3.5" floppies to USB drives. (There were CDs, but not as easy for things like schoolwork.)
ZIP needed a whole ecosystem of drives, so did you have that?
Zip drives were a must have for graphic design students in its heyday. They were relatively affordable (around $150 USD for the drive, $10 per disk iirc) and had a capacity of 100 Megabytes per disk, which was sorta shitty for removable storage even then but good enough for design project assets. There was little else commercially available at the time that was affordable and allowed you to easily port files between home/work/school, so they were everywhere in certain circles in the late 90s, particularly in design.
They were flimsy and unfortunately kinda unreliable, though, so if you heard the dreaded "click of death," it meant your disk was hosed. They eventually started selling 250 MB drives, and I remember there was the "Jaz" drive whose disks could hold 1 GB, but by then I think people were just done with Iomega's shit. I didn't know anyone that owned a frickin Jaz drive. When USB thumb drives became a thing around the turn of the millennium, Zip drives pretty much disappeared overnight. Good fuckin riddance, they sucked.
The Zip disks were much more robust than the Jazz drives. Our university had both in some departments during the era. The Zip disks lasted quite a while and did a good job (occasional failures). The Jazz drives had to be used on a perfectly stable surface because tapping them while they ran was a quick way to crash the head and destroy the disk.
Art departments, audio work, and larger data sets were kept on Zip disks. Much of the network was still Cat 3 wire (or even thicknet) with 10/100 hubs. Many of the computers being used couldn't move 100 MB with any real speed and many of them still had 1 GB internal hard disks. Burning a CD was still risky because Win95/98's scheduler sucked donkey balls and they'd fail to burn properly. Early CD blanks were $5-$13 each, so it was a big deal to burn a lot of them.
Also, there was no (or very little) centralized network file stores around campus. Most of the office workers had no place to even copy files to for sharing. You'd use the Zip disks and floppies for nearly everything if you couldn't get the windows file sharing to work directly from one desktop to another.
It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.
We had some Zip drives and later some Jaz drives running around the graphic design place where I worked way back in the day. Customers would send their files over that way.
I set up a Snap server in the DMZ with FTPS for customers to drop their files because I didn't want to deal with that shit.
We had a Jaz drive. Came in some bespoke PC my dad got from some local nerds (I think they had nerd in the name, IIRC) who would piece together computers from new parts for you, was a thing in the late '90s. I recall being shown how it worked and that was all I recall it ever being used. My family always had computers, but neither of my folks was particularly proficient in them, not had a use for anything advanced, just staying ahead of the curve tech-wise.
Yep. I've used 5 1/4s, 3.5s, Zip, CDs, CD-Rs, CD-RWs, DVDs, DVD-Rs, DVD-RWs, BD, BD-R, BD-RW, Thumb/Flash, SD, Micro SD, and CF. The only one I can think of that I never personally used were Tapes, but I know people who did. They kind of came and went in a hurry it felt like to me.
Same for me, but add:
I use LTO8 tapes every day in 2024 lol
I had a cassette drive on my TI 99/4a.
Now get off my lawn!
I don't even have a lawn but they need to get off the lawn still!
My first computer, a Commodore 64, was purchased with a tape drive because we were too broke for a 1541 5.25" disk drive.
I could start a game loading, go eat dinner, come back and it would just be getting around to being done loading.
One of the weirder ones was Orb drives/disks.
I still have this and a zip drive in a box. I'd probably need to see if the USB to serial adapter I have works with it though.
What about optilithic data rods?
When I was in high school, I got a cd burner when they were still somewhat new. Another kid wanted me to burn some mp3s into an audio cd for him, so he lent me his external zip drive loaded up with his mp3.
I feel like zip drives only made sense from around 1995-2000. They filled a gap for writable media at the time.
My dad used to pirate games and software for us off BBSes. I swear, he would download everything he could find and put it on zip drives. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that he's got a drawer somewhere filled with all the best software 1995 had to offer.
I'd be surprised if the data was still readable. Thrilled to hear, but surprised.
They may fare better than conventional 1.44mb, but I've had a hell of a time getting anything before then mid 2000s to read recently.
Magnetic media and writable CDs are pretty damn perishable.
Depends on data density. Still got a c64 with a whole box of 5 1/4" floppy disks. Last time I checked every one I tried worked fine, and they were written about 33 years ago.
Pretty sure I still have the zip drive. It has a scsi connector, but pretty sure there's a scsi card in there somewhere too. They were only popular for a small slice of time. Just like those mini tape drives with the cartridges that were about the size of a tictac container. I probably have that too.
Zip drives made sense tho.
Just lost out to thumb drives and better Internet speeds.
I'm still salty minidiscs didn't take off tho. 20 years ago an iPod cost the same as a mini disc player. But it only took 2 maybe 3 discs to surpass it's storage. And you could even use a line in to dupe a CD if you wanted.
It wasn't as fast as ripping, but the convenience factor was huge and compared to 56k Napster, didn't really take that long.
I'm pretty sure Zip lost out to CD-Rs and -RWs before the thumb drives and better Internet speeds showed up.
Also, I'm not salty at all about minidiscs because fuck Sony and all their proprietary formats.
The coolest thing about mini disc was how it looked like next-level spy shit in movies.
Minidisc was super cool. I never had one, but some of my college friends did and it just seemed so much better than a Discman.
Minidiscs absolutely took off, the format was introduced back in 1992, and discontinued in 2013, that is more than two decades.
They were common in Europe and Japan, I sadly never had one during the height of popularity, but got two used ones back in 2014.
Minidisc is probably the most visualy attractive music format I know of, most players and recorders just look fantastic.
Did minidiscs skip?
I have one still new in the box somewhere. I should find a PC museum to donate it to. Or throw it in the trash. Why do I hoard this crap?
They were gaining popularity in 1996-1998 I think, but starting from 1999 CD writers became affordable, and zip drives disappeared pretty quickly.
Some companies kept them around as backup solutions, but that stopped early in the 2000s as well. I think the zip cartridges disappeared from the market pretty much all at once.
While in audio engineering school we used all sorts of obscure data storage types, zip being one. Most were DAT tapes and digital reels (2-track, 8, 16, and 24+) with quality that would make FLAC lovers jealous, CDs were used but only for our own personal copies. We also used analog reels. We were made to learn the basics first before moving into computer audio. Fun times.
I had a zip drive, jaz drive and a super disk 120mb 3.5" floppy drive at one point.
The sound of the "Click of Death" still haunts me.
We had Jazz drives too, which just failed and caused you to lose a larger amount of data than a zip.
Yeah it was like an accidental physical computer virus of sorts. Crazy how it was contagious.
Yeah they were a thing for a brief while. I still have one in a closet. Do you need one?
I still have them, and they still work! I have two drives, one external and one internal zip drive, and probably about 30 or so disks. The real awesome ones which were too expensive for my broke ass back then were the Jaz drives with their crazy 1gb disks.
That's impressive they're still running. I got the click of death within a year of ownership on both of mine.
My high school didn't have them, but the vocational school where I took extra classes did, as did our family's PC. I thought they were great. This was about 2001-2004ish, flash drives weren't a thing yet, and burning a CD to hold a single word doc or powerpoint or something like that seemed really wasteful.
Sometimes I would put a couple mp3s on a zip drive and bring them to school to listen to while I was working on a project.
Just found an old USB Zip drive and a bunch of Zip disks in a box. Still works!
I tried them, they never seemed quite reliable enough. We used DAT tapes, CR-ROMs, and then just hard drives. At first hard drives in external enclosures then HD docks with bare drives.
(UK) my dads office had those for a good few years in the late 90's, 250mb and 500mb. Which I thought was a huge chunk of data. Roll along 2003 and University and we had ... gasp ...1gb thumb drives, at which point I realised I could email myself documents.
That was the path I took, but I remember a few college friends and several professors had a Zip drive, as did many of the computers in the lab. By the time I had the money and the need for something like that, 1Gb flash drives were cheaper.
I bought them and my future-stepfather bought them around the same time. I was using them mostly for backups IIRC (I've forgotten in the intervening ~25 years). Stepfather definitely was using them for backups.
Dont forget jazz drives, superdisks, syquest drives, Bernoulli drives, and cdr/rw, dvd+/-r, dvd-ram and tape drives!
Zip drives were sadly before my time, but I actually managed to find one in the wild! A parallel port drive in clear blue plastic for $40 at a local used media shop. Just the loose drive and cable, no box or anything. Prooooobably a touch too pricey for a device that wouldn't surprise me if it had the click of death.
Honestly I do kinda miss magnetic media like that! Having a big cartridge with moving parts ya shove into a slot just felt so nice when we used floppies as a very young kid.
I had both the 100M ZIP drives (one internal, one external) as well as the 1G JAZZ drive back in the times. Not work or study, they were mine.
My first computer was an old used Mac IIvi that came with a 40mb hard drive. I was so stoked to over double my storage when I got my Zip drive. I still have a disk in a drawer that I can’t possibly get data from.
I had a zip drive. Eventually it got the click of death though. First PC had 5 1/4 and 3.5in drives.
Yeah i worked for a company that did industrial control systems. We had a zip drive with us whenever we were in the field with all the utils for troubleshooting the equipment. It was so much better that having to lug around a desktop pc.
Yes in 2000 at a major public university we had them in all the computer labs
I knew people who had them when I was in highschool, but I never really used them until I started college in 99. They went out of favor after USB flash drives became cheaper shortly after that. I guess I only really got to use zip disks for like a year and a half lol
Yeah, but they were rarely used. Pretty much went straight from floppies to burning CDs at my house.
I was in college and working in a student computer lab at the height of zipdrives. There was a gap where floppies were way too small, CD writers were either molasses slow or not in a public university's budget, and USB was uncommon. SCSI was "da bomb!" in the parlance of the time.
Zip disks were one of the main avenues of piracy between students.
I remember the first time my Zip drive started doing the click of death. It would ruin any cartridges you put in it.
I had one. I don't remember why though... Maybe it came with a PC as part of a sales promotion?
It worked fine but nobody else had one so it was really just used for backups of "large" (at the time) data.
I had one (more than one actually) as it could store soooo much more data than a floppy disk and I needed it to move data (and pirated software) around. At work we had magneto-optic drives with a whopping 240 megs of data, IIRC
I still have a couple drives and a bunch of disks. I keep telling myself I'll resurrect my college homework for a laugh one day. Unfortunately it's hard to find a reasonably modern motherboard to hook them up (let alone finding drivers), so in the closet they sit.
You can find adapters/dongles for a lot of things.
I had trouble getting mine to work in Win10, but worked perfectly when I plugged it into an Intel Mac for some reason.
I had a SCSI Zip drive, then later a USB version. Didn't really need it for myself too much but it helped out for the rare times someone needed to give me something on that format or when I was helping someone with data recovery/data transfer.
Also used to see them around in computer labs & such so they weren't that rare.
I had a CD burner made by Iomega. ;)
I had a Sony 1x burner with scsi connector. I still have some new 1x cdr's somewhere. I remember my work buying a box of them at what I recall were $20/disc. A box of 100 was a serious chunk of change. And even at 1x I had to have a dedicated pc to burn them. Nothing else could be running especially a screensaver, and if the stream of data was interrupted you had a nice new coaster.
I owned one of the original external units and later a couple of the 3.5" internal drives. Just tossed some discs and that original drive in the trash 2 years ago
I had one at work at one time, and I saved a disc for a long time as a keepsake, but I lost it.
Yes the school district I was in for elementary thru high school really bought into ZIP and SuperDisk (I think that was the other one) for a brief perios.. Boy was that 100mb a big deal back then. This would have been around 2000
I had a SparQ drive - I did the sums, and it was the most cost-effective. A whole gigabyte per cartridge! Room for everything! I still have it in a box somewhere. It has some weird old connection... ah, parallel port according to Wikipedia.
The mad thing about it was that the drive malfunctioned a few months after I bought it. I took it back to the retailer and discovered it had been discontinued. But they still had one out the back, so the assistant swapped it for my defective one. Phew! In hindsight I should have asked for a refund. But hey, with two 1Gb cartridges I had enough storage for a lifetime!
I think I eventually got into ZIP disks once the price came down a bit, I was only like 12 or 13 at the time, so I didn't have the money to buy it early on.
Nope, because the actual drive wasn't commonly supported. I went to Best Buy and spent $65 (in 1990's money) on a 64MB thumb drive and thought that was mind-blowingly huge. I was like "well this will last me forever!".
“well this will last me forever!”
Same exact thing we said when we got our Atari 800 up to 64K of memory.
There were some audio recording devices (think 4 and 8 track recorders [not the 8-track players of the 1970s]) that used internal 100MB Zip drives for storage.
Graduated college in 2007, they were required by some of my graphic design professors
I've worked in print since 2001. The last time I saw a zip disk was probably the same year you started college.
I junked a Zip drive in a job around 2010. Could not figure any good use for it.
In 1998 I considered putting an internal 120MB Superdisk into my first PC build( A "Damage Box" with a Celeron 300A overclocked to 450MHz and Riva TNT2. Shout out to Claude Damage of Ars fame) Went with a stock 3.5 floppy instead.
I asked on a neighborhood Facebook page recently if anyone had a zip drive in the attic I could borrow - no luck. I found a couple of disks at my old family house. Probably porn, I was(am) a horndog.
Yeah. All my college computer animation projects were on zip drives. Guess I'll never see those again.
I have one still. The 124mb one I think. Its how I load samples onto my old Emu e5000 rack sampler. Havent used it in years though. Hopefully it still works.
A friend of mine did. He used a lot of video-stuff, so that was his way of archiving.
The drive died with the infamour click of death after a couple of years of use.
We had to buy our own for high school, about $5 each. They were used for CAD file storage.
My dad was a techie who always got cool software and games for his computer, way before I was even born. He still keeps his old stuff in the house.
However, last time I checked, I don't ever remember seeing a Zip disk anywhere in the house. Not even a Zip drive. It was all just floppy disks and CDs.
I wish, I was young and it wasn't cheap. My pc had some alternative, maybe super disk? (it also took floppies) Didn't get any of those disks either.
Looking into it, I think superdisks could read floppies as well.