I remember back in the late 90s we had a war between the ZIP and JAZ drive advocates, but I can't remember what the virtues of each were.
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
#62In 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…
> I never read how the zip drive can achieve 100x or more capacity than the floppy. What is the engineering feat that allowed this? Improvement in production processes and materials (e.g. magnetic coatings) allowing smaller tracks and smaller more precisely positioned heads. The 3 1/2 floppy dates back to 1983, the high-density 1.44MB to 1986, the Zip drive was released in 1994. A “super high density” 20 MB floppy ha…
> Improvement in production processes and materials (e.g. magnetic coatings) allowing smaller tracks
Improvements in coatings improve the data per track, but no improvement was needed for increasing the amount of tracks. On a 1.44MB drive there are 100 000 bits per track, but only 80 tracks per side. Or, in other terms, the length of a single bit along the track (on the innermost track) was ~1.2µm, and the width of that same bit, sideways to the track, was ~200µm, for an aspect ratio of 166:1. As far as the media was concerned, roughly 10:1 aspect ratio would have been more than enough, or a normal 1.44MB floppy could have supported more than a 1000 tracks per side.
The limiting factor was that old floppies had no way for the head to follow the track, it was just indexed into a fixed position by the drive mechanism. This meant that the tracks had to be ridiculously wide to support all the possible misalignment on both the reader and the writer. To improve track density, what was needed was some mechanism to make the head locate the tracks and follow them as the disk rotated under them. Iomega solved this by etching shallow concentric circles for the tracks on the surface of the disc. These rings were essentially invisible for the magnetic head, but allowed a separate laser to pick the up and follow them.
Re: Why Zip drives dominated the 90s, then vanished almost overnight
#63I'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 dr…
Those were exactly the people I was thinking of when I said it didn't bring enough value. Yes, plenty of students saw a Zip drive bay in their school computers and bought it on the theory that if it was there the schools must know what they were doing and it was a "requirement" of one sort or another. It didn't occur to them that the Zip drives were there because Iomega probably bought their way in, rather than because they were actually a vital tool.
And students may have gotten some minimal, non-zero utility from it, but almost everything they would have been doing at the time would have fit on a floppy disk just fine. Maybe two. The Zip drive was slightly more convenient... for about $150 more. Aroud $300 inflation-adjusted.
That's not $300's worth of value, and especially not $300's worth of value for a college student. I can manage a couple of floppies and "that one time I had a really big project" for $300 as a college student.
Yes, I'm sure you have a story of that one guy who had an 80MB project that fit no other way. But think of all the people who had 96% empty drives because all their documents were tiny that don't come to mind.
You will note that there was no cohort of people coming out of college demanding Zip drives everywhere else in the world after them, because I doubt very many of your students came away with a strongly positive impression of the Zip drive, even for those for whom it worked perfectly.
Re: Why Zip drives dominated the 90s, then vanished almost overnight
#64When Zip drives hit the market, I already had a SyQuest drive and the Zip drive didn't have much more capacity and its parallel interface was slower than my computer's SCSI interface. I assumed Zip disks would be less reliable than hard disks, as floppy disks had been.
The SyQuest had a real hard drive platter in it so you knew it was robust. The Zip platter was harder than a floppy but softer than a hard drive, so you knew it wasn't as robust.
So I had no incentive to buy into Zip. I saw a few people use them but I assumed they'd never heard of SyQuest and didn't know better. I never had anyone ask for data on a Zip disk or want to give me data on a Zip disk, so I never bothered.
Later when the click-of-death started happening, I figured it would die off and people would switch to SyQuest, but then there was Jaz, which wasn't as popular as Zip, and then CD-ROM took over, which held a lot of data, but was still slow (in spite of IDE) and still not as robust as the SyQuest products.
In 1998, at their end, SyQuest had a 4.7 GB unit, I presume to compete with DVD.
Re: Why Zip drives dominated the 90s, then vanished almost overnight
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
How many of them have actual need for terabytes of storage? And I mean business continuity critical one.
Overall they are much better of buying a few external HDDs. Standard interface, sufficient capacity. Just get trusted person to carry one out every month or three months. For continuous stuff just have NAS.
Re: Why Zip drives dominated the 90s, then vanished almost overnight
#66Zip drives were very cool, and even cooler, my folks owned a Powerbook G3 at the time, which allowed hot swapping a Zip drive into the expansion bay (in place of floppy/CD/battery)
Ah, the pismo
Re: Why Zip drives dominated the 90s, then vanished almost overnight
#67Physical media is the answer to content overload: it has a thingness that the ephemera of online digital content does not. Its physical nature allows for artistic expression on and in the thing. The act of insertion and removal provides a psychological gate between "starting", "doing" and "finishing".
It is the opposite of The Eternal Scroll. It is the hero we need.
Re: Why Zip drives dominated the 90s, then vanished almost overnight
#68The end came quickly.
https://www.deseret.com/1999/8/20/19461583/iomega-president-...
Re: Why Zip drives dominated the 90s, then vanished almost overnight
#69> Why Zip drives dominated the 90s, then vanished almost overnight This is such an odd take to me. I sold and supported computers in the 1990s. Outside of a few industries, such as desktop publishing, Zip was not popular. The vast majority of computer owners never owned a Zip drive, unlike a floppy or soon to be CDROM. In fact, I sold far more QIC-80 tape drives for backups than Zip drives. Zip also didn't vanish ove…
There were some niche use cases too.
For awhile, the Ontario Health Insurance Program allowed physicians to submit their billing in person via zip drive. I remember depositing the disks for my parents (funny the things one remembers)
This was the time between paper billing and digital submissions.
Re: Why Zip drives dominated the 90s, then vanished almost overnight
#70Zip drives were revolutionary for 100mb and then 250mb storage, at the same time that many people gained widespread access to the Internet. But they were proprietary and required you to have an external drive available to write or read from them (and that might also mean a SCSI port).
So when affordable CD-R became available, even though early drives were slow writers, they had the advantage that they could be read from practically any computer. With ubiquitous non-proprietary CD-ROM drives and the huge 700mb capacity, Zip drives were tossed as soon as someone bought a CD-R drive.