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Why Zip drives dominated the 90s, then vanished almost overnight

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Re: Why Zip drives dominated the 90s, then vanished almost overnight

#21

Post by ramses0 »

The other "has been" technology of the era was the "LS-120 SuperDisk". It was backwards compatible with standard 1.44MB 3.5" disks but you could buy special disks with 120MB capacity, and you didn't need to take up two slots on your front bays for both floppy and zip (and could write back to standard 1.44MB disks when taking some files to campus or sharing with "normal" computers). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperDisk

...in retrospect as the article states: swept away by CD-rw and USB sticks, but a great technology! There really was a critical gap in "I need to back up _all_ my files or coursework for the semester" or "Wouldn't it be great to be able to fit TEN games on a floppy instead of ONE game on ten floppies?"

It really was a different era!

Re: Why Zip drives dominated the 90s, then vanished almost overnight

#22

Post by konart »

maximinus_thrax wrote: post #19
konart wrote: post #12

I'm sure this is the second time I even read about them. I don't even think I've seen a single on here in Russia in the 90s. 5.25 in my fathers company? Sure. 3.5 everywhere else? Da. CDs at some point. Hell, even minidisc was there (also almost non-existent, I think I know only two people who actually owned a minidisc player). No sing of Zip.

> I don't even think I've seen a single on here in Russia in the 90s. I'm not surprised, considering they were expensive. That doesn't mean they weren't popular in the west.

CDs where not cheap either, mind you. Yet CDs replaced cassettes rather quickly.

Re: Why Zip drives dominated the 90s, then vanished almost overnight

#23

Post by gugagore »

iamtedd wrote: post #2

In all these nostalgic retrospectives, I never read how the zip drive can achieve 100x or more capacity than the floppy. What is the engineering feat that allowed this? There's one paragraph in Wikipedia that says the heads fly across the disk like a hard drive. OK, how did they manage that while the disk isn't sealed? Is that all it took? Similarly, articles just gloss right over the "click of death" without any tec…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floptical

A related technology with a name that already answers your question.

Re: Why Zip drives dominated the 90s, then vanished almost overnight

#24

Post by sublinear »

ben_w wrote: post #9
bananaflag wrote: post #3

There was also the issue that one would also need a reader. Why would I buy a zip reader if no one else has one (network effect)? (Btw I never saw in my life a zip reader or a zip disk.) Whereas with USB sticks all one needed was a USB port. I immediately wanted a stick.

Before the first iMac arrived with only USB ports and thereby forced peripheral makers to support USB, USB just wasn't all that common even in the Windows world: why would a 1997 manufacturer bother with USB when all the machines already had all the other ports we here in 2026 find subsumed into USB? But only a few years later, as you say, USB thumb drives were making Zip drives irrelevant.

Was it really the iMac that did it? I don't think I remember anyone saying that until recent years. Around the time of the first iMac, just about every home PC already had a pair of USB 1.1 ports because of Windows 98 and a lot more plug and play support.

What I recall being sold for Mac were FireWire peripherals back in the late 90s and most of the 2000s. By 2000, USB 2.0 was too good to ignore and addressed all the pain points manufacturers had with USB 1.1 being too slow. That's when I remember USB drives finally being practical and mainstream.

Re: Why Zip drives dominated the 90s, then vanished almost overnight

#26

Post by nubinetwork »

ndr42 wrote: post #10

Interesting that in that time all kind of external storage solutions emerged: I used Zip drives, the follow-up "Jaz drive" (1GB) and Syquest disks (270 MB?). The latter two chained together with thick SCSI cables to a PowerMac 7200. Edit: Today I use just 2.5" SSDs in the same way. There's a small sata to usb-c adapter where I plug them in without any further enclosure.

Jaz was really where the technology excelled, but it also had its own problems, and after dealing with zip failures, iomega was basically dead.

Re: Why Zip drives dominated the 90s, then vanished almost overnight

#27

Post by lizknope »

TL ; DR

Floppy disks were tiny and slow

Zip drives in 1995 were around $200 and 100MB disk for about $20

CD-R burners in 1995 were $1000 and blank CD-R were about $15 each

By 1999 CD-R burners were around $125 and blank discs were around $1 and dropping fast. I remember when they were $0.10 for a 700MB disc in the 2000s

Re: Why Zip drives dominated the 90s, then vanished almost overnight

#29

Post by swiftcoder »

sublinear wrote: post #24
ben_w wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before the first iMac arrived with only USB ports and thereby forced peripheral makers to support USB, USB just wasn't all that common even in the Windows world: why would a 1997 manufacturer bother with USB when all the machines already had all the other ports we here in 2026 find subsumed into USB? But only a few years later, as you say, USB thumb drives were making Zip drives irrelevant.

Was it really the iMac that did it? I don't think I remember anyone saying that until recent years. Around the time of the first iMac, just about every home PC already had a pair of USB 1.1 ports because of Windows 98 and a lot more plug and play support. What I recall being sold for Mac were FireWire peripherals back in the late 90s and most of the 2000s. By 2000, USB 2.0 was too good to ignore and addressed all the…

The iMac certainly accelerated the adoption curve. There were USB ports on other PCs, but since they also had normal (at the time) ports, no PC users were going out and buying all-new USB peripherals.

Apple's decision to leave out all the other ports meant that a bunch of folks were forced to buy new USB peripherals (and/or adapters), and gave peripheral manufacturers a dedicated market for USB

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