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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

#91

Post by bombcar »

lizknope wrote: post #90
bombcar wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Th…

Zip disks continued in their niche until USB sticks were large enough and reliable enough - because of that ability to use them as a disk - there were some packages that claimed to turn a CD-RW (or even a CD-R using append) into something that pretended to be editable, but they weren't great.

Macs did much better with removable drives for years since the users were used to "ejecting" the disk instead of just pulling it out.

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

#92

Post by sublinear »

ben_w wrote: post #78
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.

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 che…

> Apple made that happen for USB

Yup I do think that's true for Mac users, and questioning Apple fans' just-so stories are usually worthwhile to anyone curious. They sure do keep history alive and well. I mean, hey, The Beatles made an entire career out of doing that with their fans!

I just realized this month was Apple's 50th anniversary, so that's likely part of why this is making the rounds. I guess I have my answer.

Probably also worth noting the list of founding members of the USB-IF did not include Apple (not surprising). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_Implementers_Forum

The motivations behind the "legacy-free PC" has its own Wikipedia page too which is pretty neat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy-free_PC

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

#93

Post by kjellsbells »

amelius wrote: post #48
traceroute66 wrote: post #41

Earlier 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.

Back in the era when Zip drives were around, there was a prosumer/SMB tape standard: 1/4-inch QIC. I sold many PCs with a tape drive in one of the drive bays. They were awesome.

They also sucked from a support point of view. People would mistreat the tape. Store them next to giant magnets or on top of the microwave in the restaurant. Forget to run the weekly backup and then blame you when they lost files. I couldn't wait to get them on to CD-RW which showed up for SMBs very soon afterwards in the late 1990s, and then eventually to the cloud. What a relief to no longer need magnetic media.

The irony now is that many of the SMBs I see today (though I no longer consult for them) have effectively zero backup because all their business process is tied up in a SaaS that they do not control. Eg their website is on squarespace, their tasks are on Asana, and their finances are in Quickbooks. Any one of these goes dark, or out of business, or is vandalized and it's curtains for the whole business.

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

#94

Post by lizknope »

bombcar wrote: post #91
lizknope wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Th…

Zip disks continued in their niche until USB sticks were large enough and reliable enough - because of that ability to use them as a disk - there were some packages that claimed to turn a CD-RW (or even a CD-R using append) into something that pretended to be editable, but they weren't great. Macs did much better with removable drives for years since the users were used to "ejecting" the disk instead of just pulling…

Back around 1999 I tested some patches from Linux kernel hacker Jens Axboe that added packet writing support. This enabled DVD+RW discs to look like normal drives and you didn't have to make an ISO image and burn it.

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v6.1/cdrom/packet-writing.ht...

https://reactivated.net/software/packetwriting/

And in my googling for those links I find that Jens is still the block device maintainer and submitted a patch in 2025 to remove support for packet writing.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-To-Remove-pktcdvd

> "This driver has long outlived it's utility, and it's broken and unloved. The main use case for this was direct mount with UDF of cd-rw drives that required 32kb packets. It would collect writes into that size and write them out in multiples of that. That's not a common use case anymore, the world has moved on from those kinds of media. To make matters worse, it's actively breaking setups where it's not even required or useful."

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

#97

Post by t312227 »

hello,

zip-drives where great - at least compared to what other possibilities where around these days:

overall, zip-drives where not that expensive, especially the medias.

but they died every now& then ...

so it was more or less only a possibility to transfer data, not so much to archive it! this was what cd-r and later dvd-r where there for :)

imho. the "real" problem where often the drives themselfs, they where available with various interfaces, the most common was (!) parallel / "printer-port" / centronics (!) .. veeery slow.

the "best" ones had scsi =?> fast etc. but you needed an scsi-controller with an external connector for that

if i remember it correctly, there where even IDE/PATA-drives available - but i think only internal ones - and later usb-variants (also slow) ...

btw. what where the alternative in the late 1990ties!?

* syquests

great drives, especially the 5.25 inch variants, but they where already "dated" by then. and the 3.5 inch variants where pretty expensive and had reliability-issues ...

additionally: lots of people mistook the 3,5 inch variants for floppy-disk-drives and ruined early models by inserting floppies into them =?> the later got some mechanical protection against that!

* (old) harddisks

my "medium of choice" where old hdds, which i plugged into the machines between which i wanted to transfer data ...

by far the "best" option, but also the most "technical" one ;)

just my 0.02€

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

#98

Post by fractallyte »

TMWNN wrote: post #84
fractallyte wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Unfortunately, I never got around to using it! I bought it with high hopes, but my Zip disks turned out to be so convenient and spacious that the VHS-backup need never arose.

That said, it's not too late... I still have my Amiga system in storage, and a VHS recorder.

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

#99

Post by rasz »

LeCompteSftware wrote: post #76
rasz wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>software developers couldn't release on NEC without excluding IBM customers

Oh they could and they did in Japan when those computers were sold. PC-88 is not IBM PC compatible.

https://necretro.org/PC-88_VA3

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

#100

Post by TMWNN »

fractallyte wrote: post #98
TMWNN wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How reliable did you find VBS?

Unfortunately, I never got around to using it! I bought it with high hopes, but my Zip disks turned out to be so convenient and spacious that the VHS-backup need never arose. That said, it's not too late... I still have my Amiga system in storage, and a VHS recorder.

>I bought it with high hopes, but my Zip disks turned out to be so convenient and spacious that the VHS-backup need never arose.

It's good to hear, in retrospect, that you were able to use a storage medium that did not even exist when Amiga were discontinued. Which type of interface for the Zip drive works with it?

(It occurs to me that Zip disks presumably offer the great virtue, otherwise absent as I understand it for Amigans, of PC compatibility.)

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