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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

#41

Post by traceroute66 »

amelius wrote: post #28

Speaking of backup solutions, why don't we ever see pro-sumer priced tape drives? The technology behind capable LTO drives is now more than 10 years old, shouldn't we see some reductions in price now? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open

> why don't we ever see pro-sumer priced tape drives? The technology behind capable LTO drives is now more than 10 years old, shouldn't we see some reductions in price now

First, LTO drives are conceptually simple, but if you've ever opened one up you'll know they are a feat of horribly complex engineering.

Second, they are not a commodity product. Infact thanks to the magic cloud they are even LESS of a commodity product than they were 10 years ago because lots of people have either wholesale moved to the cloud or use S3 for backup.

1 + 2 = Low volume product with lots of parts crammed into it = high manufacturing cost = high price.

The orgs who still use LTO in their infra are the sort of orgs who don't blink at the price tag. The cost of the CTO's farts is probably more than a 5k tape drive.

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

#42

Post by LeCompteSftware »

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…

The real question is why were 1.44mb 3 1/2" floppy drives used for so long when they were totally obsolete by 1990. I would love to read a more coherent and unified history; my understanding is that there were tons of competing higher-capacity 3 1/2" drives between ~1985 and 1995, but software developers were stuck releasing on 1.44mb because that was the only format which worked reliably across manufacturers. By the time Zip drive came out, software was distributed on CD and higher-capacity floppies were really only used for (geographically) local data transfer.

Wikipedia says there was a serious attempt to standardize a 20mb floppy in 1990 which fell apart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk#High-capacity It's really not the case that Zip made some great leap forward; 15 years of technology's steady march didn't fully trickle down to consumer hardware because of compatibility issues between competing manufacturers.

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

#43

Post by jerf »

I'd offer an alternative take, though it's not completely incompatible with the article: They are an example of the fact that you can buy putting your product on front of lots of people, but you can't buy keeping it there. It has to be good on its own merit to survive. Or at least, it gets more and more expensive to hold it in front of people.

It was, in a lot of ways, too early. I never had one, and I never missed having one. I had other solutions to the problems when they happened. By the time I had the problem, it was not a cost-effective solution.

I know people can pop up and say that it solved some problems for them, but I think the people who it solved problems for, in proportion to the price, weren't enough of a market. By the time they were, CD burners were a much cheaper solution.

If they were 1/4 the price, it might have been a different story... but the price was pretty fundamental to the tech.

You can't buy success. You can buy initial success, but not long term success. By the standards of such products, Zip was relatively successful, because it did have some people it solved a problem for. It was just a minority of their customer base. Enough to hang on for a while, but not to take over the world.

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

#44

Post by TacticalCoder »

I was there in the mid- to late nineties writing computer books and doing the typesetting myself on QuarkXPress (in the prehistoric era before InDesign existed), back in an era where you'd enter a bookshop and 95%+ of the book and magazines were typeset on QuarkXPress on a Mac.

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

And we'd all have Zip drives and even internal Zip drives reader/writer in our G3. Can be seen on the picture here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Macintosh_G3

They were big indeed and I'd say huge in the publishing industry. Then the CD writers and then DVD writers began to rule to earth.

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

#45

Post by cyanydeez »

konart wrote: post #22
maximinus_thrax wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

They were like a 3-4 year fad while also CD burners were coming online so they did not really provide a significant storage medium because if you wanted large sizes, you typically just needed readonly CDs.

Needing large and Read-Write was the niche than CD-R and CD-RW did much better. Along with CDs in general, they just didn't do much more than span a small temporal gap in value proposition.

T

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

#46

Post by dtech »

swiftcoder wrote: post #29
sublinear wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't but this. The first 2 generations of iPod didn't even have USB connectors, only FireWire, which was a PITA as most PCs had a USB connection by that time but FireWire wasn't common as opposed to Mac.

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

#47

Post by swiftcoder »

sublinear wrote: post #36
swiftcoder wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm not really convinced. It seems that even Apple quickly caved in and put FireWire on the G3 iMac when they updated the design to a slot loader in 1999. I don't have anything against Apple, but USB before the 2000s was pretty bad. It seems weird that people are now thinking otherwise.

> but USB before the 2000s was pretty bad

Indeed. So bad that no one apart from Apple would have tried to go all-in on it. I doubt things like USB mice and keyboards would ever have happened if Apple didn't give it a kick in the behind

Firewire was indeed a nice addition when that came along, but it always remained the domain of pricey high-bandwidth devices.

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

#48

Post by amelius »

traceroute66 wrote: post #41
amelius wrote: post #28

Speaking of backup solutions, why don't we ever see pro-sumer priced tape drives? The technology behind capable LTO drives is now more than 10 years old, shouldn't we see some reductions in price now? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open

> why don't we ever see pro-sumer priced tape drives? The technology behind capable LTO drives is now more than 10 years old, shouldn't we see some reductions in price now First, LTO drives are conceptually simple, but if you've ever opened one up you'll know they are a feat of horribly complex engineering. Second, they are not a commodity product. Infact thanks to the magic cloud they are even LESS of a commodity pr…

> Second, they are not a commodity product.

Are you sure, there's millions of small-to-medium businesses that could use a good and cheap backup solution for terabytes of data.

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

#49

Post by mingus88 »

jerf wrote: post #43

I'd offer an alternative take, though it's not completely incompatible with the article: They are an example of the fact that you can buy putting your product on front of lots of people, but you can't buy keeping it there. It has to be good on its own merit to survive. Or at least, it gets more and more expensive to hold it in front of people. It was, in a lot of ways, too early. I never had one, and I never missed h…

I worked in a university computer lab in the late 90s and these drives were very popular. Burning a CD was not a similar solution.

People needed primary portable storage and Zip drives were amazing solutions before USB drives.

The school gave each student just 15MB of storage for their email account, which was also their homedir storage for any other school project

But the labs had at least a few stations with Zip drives

The article quotes a pretty low failure rate overall but I suspect college students were seeing these fail a lot more because they just threw the disks in their bags and walked around to class all day. Having to deal with someone whose only copy of their work was on one of these triggers a traumatic response in me.

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

#50

Post by sublinear »

swiftcoder wrote: post #47
sublinear wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not really convinced. It seems that even Apple quickly caved in and put FireWire on the G3 iMac when they updated the design to a slot loader in 1999. I don't have anything against Apple, but USB before the 2000s was pretty bad. It seems weird that people are now thinking otherwise.

> but USB before the 2000s was pretty bad Indeed. So bad that no one apart from Apple would have tried to go all-in on it. I doubt things like USB mice and keyboards would ever have happened if Apple didn't give it a kick in the behind Firewire was indeed a nice addition when that came along, but it always remained the domain of pricey high-bandwidth devices.

I did some more digging to find out that the infamous BSOD demo with Bill Gates on stage was meant to show off plug and play on Windows 98. It was caused by a USB scanner.

This happened 4 months before the release date of the first iMac.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=IW7Rqwwth84

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