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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

#71

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

At the height of first phase of using Macs between 1992 and 1998 having an Mac LCII and later a PowerMac 6100/60, I had a 5 device SCSI chain including a Zip Drive and later a Jaz drive (1GB removable drive) along with two hard drives and CDROM drive.

I remember that the biggest problems with Zip drives was that most Windows PCs didn’t come with SCSI and that they had some Frankenstein parallel port version.

For context when I bought my Zip drive, my internal hard drive was only 80MB and part of that was used as an emulated hard drive for my Apple //e card.

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

#72

Post by ticulatedspline »

I worked at a university bookstore and we sold lots of disks. while CDs were killing them for long-term storage zips were required for some courses because RW disks suck.

those zip disks were not cheap 10$-15$ each for a paltry 100mb.

the rise of USB sticks really killed them. you could get a 128mb usb stick for similar or cheaper and you didn't need the clunky unreliable zip drive to use them.

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

#73

Post by PearlRiver »

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.

In my country PCs did not catch on until the second part of the 90s. Before then computers were found in offices and labs.

Hell the first commercial ISP in the Netherlands only started in 1995.

By the time the digital age arrived for the general population CD ROM and DSL were a thing.

It is easy to forget that for decades computers were basically a sub culture thing that did not touch mainstream society.

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

#74

Post by rasz »

LeCompteSftware wrote: post #42
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…

3.5 inch already peaked in 1985, thats when NEC first shipped 1.44MB inside PC-8801 mkII MR. IBM followed two years later switching PS/2 to HD floppies, Apple in 1988. 80 tracks ~50KB/s speed. In 1990 IBM bumped PS/2 to 2.88 ED. Different magnetic material, double the bitrate, ~100KB/s.

... But NEC beat IBM by already doing 'five blades' in 1988 selling PC-88 VA3 with 'Triple' or '2TD' format 3.5" floppy sporting 13MB unformatted 9MB formatted capacity. Same perpendicular head as ED, same magnetic medium, same bitrate, 3 times more tracks (240) while still using cheap stepper motor unlike ZIP head actuators, compatible with same standard ED floppy controller chips. Sadly no one in the west adopted it :(((

There was one more avenue for bumping capacity never really explored on PC - zone bit recording invented by Chuck Peddle in 1961 and supported by Floppy controllers in Macintoshes, Commodore (Chuck Peddle designed drives) and Victor 9000 (Chuck Peddle designed whole computer). Free 50% capacity bump. Victor 9000 pulled 1.2MB capacity out of Double Density 80 track 5 1/4 drive.

Combine 2TD wiht ZBR and we could have had cheap 13.5MB formatted capacity floppies since 1988.

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

#75

Post by classified »

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…

> There's nothing new in this article.

An article about an old and long abandoned technology naturally contains nothing new. What did you expect?

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

#76

Post by LeCompteSftware »

rasz wrote: post #74
LeCompteSftware wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

3.5 inch already peaked in 1985, thats when NEC first shipped 1.44MB inside PC-8801 mkII MR. IBM followed two years later switching PS/2 to HD floppies, Apple in 1988. 80 tracks ~50KB/s speed. In 1990 IBM bumped PS/2 to 2.88 ED. Different magnetic material, double the bitrate, ~100KB/s. ... But NEC beat IBM by already doing 'five blades' in 1988 selling PC-88 VA3 with 'Triple' or '2TD' format 3.5" floppy sporting 13M…

That's kind of the point of my comment - software developers couldn't release on NEC without excluding IBM customers etc etc. They were stuck with 1.44MB because that was the only thing guaranteed to work. There was a human management problem around agreeing on a specification; drive manufacturers and software companies simply had conflicting incentives, so the market was a mess.

In retrospect I think the only reason Zip was able to become the undisputed market leader in high-capacity disks is that CD-ROM fully took over commercial software distribution.

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

#77

Post by ButlerianJihad »

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…

There is no question that Zip Drives succeeded by dominating the shelves of every computer store I ever shopped at. They had a massive share of that all-important real-estate.

This was a market where people were building PCs from no-name components in plain wrapping. Most everything I ordered was out of the back of a trade rag with classified ads that were nothing but tight listings of part numbers and prices. Zip Drive was akin to SoundBlaster in its uniquely flashy, colorful packaging, branded hardware offering.

I eschewed them for a while, and when SyQuest came out with a PC-compatible (and SCSI-compatible) competitor, I picked that up instead. Why? Because SyQuest had imprinted their brand on me when I saw every serious Apple user with a SyQuest on their desk or in their pocket. I knew that this was a tacit testimony of reliability. SyQuest had the necessary experience and R&D already in place to provide quality and reliability, where Zip had none of that reputation.

My SyQuest never failed or clicked, although it became obsolete at the same rate as the Zips. I never regretted not having a Zip drive, for sure!

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

#78

Post by ben_w »

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.

Sure. The point I was claiming was not Apple being first nor early USB being good, though I don't speak for swiftcoder.

When Firewire was introduced, it wasn't ever popular enough to get the self-sustaining popularity loop of "all the machines have it" "all the peripheral makers support it".

Apple made that happen for USB. Not because USB was amazing in 1997, but because it was the only thing on what was then the cheapest new Mac.

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

#79

Post by ben_w »

dtech wrote: post #46
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 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.

Apple is consistently weird about peripherals, yes.

Hockey Puck mouse.

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

#80

Post by ben_w »

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…

IIRC, the Mac magazines I read at the time were making this claim.

The magazines may have been wrong and their claims turned into an urban legend in the meantime, but it's part of the general sense of what I recall from, ugh, nearly 30 years back now.

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