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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

#81

Post by orev »

jerf wrote: post #63
mingus88 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 becau…

Zip drives arrived at exactly the same time as digital art, the web, and most importantly Macromedia Flash. Maybe the CS people with a few source code files didn’t fully use the space, but the art kids certainly did.

There simply was no other option at the time than Zip drives. Others did not strike the right balance of price, capacity, responsiveness, etc. Maybe Iomega paid to get them installed, I don’t know, but there really was no other option so I can easily see schools buying them just because they needed a solution.

USB thumb drives started appearing not long after, and they didn’t suffer from the click of death, so those became the preferred media by the time those people graduated school.

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

#82

Post by jasomill »

While I owned and used several Zip drives back in the day, the first thing that came to mind when I saw this post was the final scene of Zoolander, where a Zip disk backup of incriminating files saves the day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cALVig8bw9w&t=177s

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

#83

Post by jasomill »

timbit42 wrote: post #64

When 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 y…

SyQuest and Iomega were both founded in the early '80s and introduced their first removable disk products in 1982, and both introduced cost-reduced consumer-oriented drives in 1995 (EZ135 and Zip, respectively).

IIRC, Iomega captured the consumer market with the Zip drive for mostly business reasons (better marketing, contracts with major retailers and PC OEMs, etc.).

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

#84

Post by TMWNN »

fractallyte wrote: post #38
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

VHS video cassettes could be used as tape drives! There was this, from the same era: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArVid And I have this for my Amiga, also same era: http://www.hugolyppens.com/VBS.html

How reliable did you find VBS?

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

#86

Post by LocalH »

masklinn wrote: post #7
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…

> 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…

The real click of death was when this was due to a catastrophic failure - say, one of the heads had become completely dislodged and was suddenly hanging loose. Then, every single cartridge you inserted into such a drive would be damaged. If you then took that cartridge and inserted it into a fully working drive, it had a good chance of subsequently destroying that drive.

Steve Gibson has a good site with historical information from the time when these drives were still marketed and sold: https://www.grc.com/tip/codfaq1.htm

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

#88

Post by KevinMS »

They were the best way to pirate software from work, like Photoshop and illustrator.

I also learned a 90's bubble investment tip on TV that if you went to the companies office and night and all the lights were on they were cooking and worth investing in. And the TV investor said he visited Iomega and they were cooking.

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

#89

Post by jnaina »

Iomega's earlier offering, the Bernoulli Box (I had a few of these), was a solid, dependable removable storage product, though the media was expensive and physically rather large.

The Zip drives that followed were abysmal. We sold a lot of them initially (I was working in a computer store in the early nineties), but sales cratered once the "click of death" became infamous. SyQuest drives suffered from similar reliability issues.

The founder of SyQuest, Syed Iftikhar, later left and set up another company called Castlewood, which introduced yet another removable drive called the Orb. The Orb was genuinely faster and more reliable than anything Iomega or SyQuest had offered.

But with the advent of cheap flash drives and faster broadband internet, transfer and storage of data shifted decisively away from spinning removable media, and the entire category quietly died, taking Castlewood, Iomega, Imation, and SyQuest with it.

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

#90

Post by lizknope »

bombcar wrote: post #53
lizknope wrote: post #27

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

That was exactly the experience I had - there was a very narrow window where ZIP drives were the best option, but once you had some they hung around into the early 2000s.

I knew a bunch of Mac graphic design people that used Zip disks into the 2000's because they had to transfer huge files and the Zip discs were rewritable unlike CD-R. Rewriting a CD-RW is clunky compared to a Zip disk.

I actually bought one of these Panasonic PD Phase-change Dual drives in 1995. It was $500 and the cartridges were $30 for 650MB. I formatted them as ext2 and used the standard cp / mv / rm commands. This technology later evolved into the DVD-RAM standard. DVD-RW and DVD+RW were very different.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-change_Dual

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