Where I was it went from 3.5" floppies to USB drives. (There were CDs, but not as easy for things like schoolwork.)
Pretty sure I still have the zip drive. It has a scsi connector, but pretty sure there’s a scsi card in there somewhere too. They were only popular for a small slice of time. Just like those mini tape drives with the cartridges that were about the size of a tictac container. I probably have that too.
Zip drives made sense tho.
Just lost out to thumb drives and better Internet speeds.
I’m still salty minidiscs didn’t take off tho. 20 years ago an iPod cost the same as a mini disc player. But it only took 2 maybe 3 discs to surpass it’s storage. And you could even use a line in to dupe a CD if you wanted.
It wasn’t as fast as ripping, but the convenience factor was huge and compared to 56k Napster, didn’t really take that long.
Did minidiscs skip?
If you tried really hard it was supposed to be technically possible.
But I never had it happen
I have one still new in the box somewhere. I should find a PC museum to donate it to. Or throw it in the trash. Why do I hoard this crap?
- most people did the floppy / USB drive path
- but if you were in a field that needed more storage, then it became the floppy / SyQuest / ZIP / USB drive path
- SyQuest disks (and drives) were a serious pain in the ass, temperamental and flaky as hell …
(UK) my dads office had those for a good few years in the late 90’s, 250mb and 500mb. Which I thought was a huge chunk of data. Roll along 2003 and University and we had … gasp …1gb thumb drives, at which point I realised I could email myself documents.
I had a zip drive, jaz drive and a super disk 120mb 3.5" floppy drive at one point.
My high school didn’t have them, but the vocational school where I took extra classes did, as did our family’s PC. I thought they were great. This was about 2001-2004ish, flash drives weren’t a thing yet, and burning a CD to hold a single word doc or powerpoint or something like that seemed really wasteful.
Sometimes I would put a couple mp3s on a zip drive and bring them to school to listen to while I was working on a project.
Zip drives were a must have for graphic design students in its heyday. They were relatively affordable (around $150 USD for the drive, $10 per disk iirc) and had a capacity of 100 Megabytes per disk, which was sorta shitty for removable storage even then but good enough for design project assets. There was little else commercially available at the time that was affordable and allowed you to easily port files between home/work/school, so they were everywhere in certain circles in the late 90s, particularly in design.
They were flimsy and unfortunately kinda unreliable, though, so if you heard the dreaded “click of death,” it meant your disk was hosed. They eventually started selling 250 MB drives, and I remember there was the “Jaz” drive whose disks could hold 1 GB, but by then I think people were just done with Iomega’s shit. I didn’t know anyone that owned a frickin Jaz drive. When USB thumb drives became a thing around the turn of the millennium, Zip drives pretty much disappeared overnight. Good fuckin riddance, they sucked.
We had a Jaz drive. Came in some bespoke PC my dad got from some local nerds (I think they had nerd in the name, IIRC) who would piece together computers from new parts for you, was a thing in the late '90s. I recall being shown how it worked and that was all I recall it ever being used. My family always had computers, but neither of my folks was particularly proficient in them, not had a use for anything advanced, just staying ahead of the curve tech-wise.
The Zip disks were much more robust than the Jazz drives. Our university had both in some departments during the era. The Zip disks lasted quite a while and did a good job (occasional failures). The Jazz drives had to be used on a perfectly stable surface because tapping them while they ran was a quick way to crash the head and destroy the disk.
Art departments, audio work, and larger data sets were kept on Zip disks. Much of the network was still Cat 3 wire (or even thicknet) with 10/100 hubs. Many of the computers being used couldn’t move 100 MB with any real speed and many of them still had 1 GB internal hard disks. Burning a CD was still risky because Win95/98’s scheduler sucked donkey balls and they’d fail to burn properly. Early CD blanks were $5-$13 each, so it was a big deal to burn a lot of them.
Also, there was no (or very little) centralized network file stores around campus. Most of the office workers had no place to even copy files to for sharing. You’d use the Zip disks and floppies for nearly everything if you couldn’t get the windows file sharing to work directly from one desktop to another.
It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.
We had some Zip drives and later some Jaz drives running around the graphic design place where I worked way back in the day. Customers would send their files over that way.
I set up a Snap server in the DMZ with FTPS for customers to drop their files because I didn’t want to deal with that shit.
I set up a Snap server in the DMZ with FTPS for customers to drop their files because I didn’t want to deal with that shit.
Lol you were ahead of your time! I’m sure they appreciated not having to FedEx it or drop it off themselves.
No, the customers were several years behind the times. They didn’t want to buy flash drives even though Jaz was already discontinued a couple of years before I started working there.
Thank you for thinking this humble drunk could be an innovator though.
Yeah, but they were rarely used. Pretty much went straight from floppies to burning CDs at my house.
Yep. I’ve used 5 1/4s, 3.5s, Zip, CDs, CD-Rs, CD-RWs, DVDs, DVD-Rs, DVD-RWs, BD, BD-R, BD-RW, Thumb/Flash, SD, Micro SD, and CF. The only one I can think of that I never personally used were Tapes, but I know people who did. They kind of came and went in a hurry it felt like to me.
My first computer, a Commodore 64, was purchased with a tape drive because we were too broke for a 1541 5.25" disk drive.
I could start a game loading, go eat dinner, come back and it would just be getting around to being done loading.
I remember the first time my Zip drive started doing the click of death. It would ruin any cartridges you put in it.
I was in college and working in a student computer lab at the height of zipdrives. There was a gap where floppies were way too small, CD writers were either molasses slow or not in a public university’s budget, and USB was uncommon. SCSI was “da bomb!” in the parlance of the time.
Zip disks were one of the main avenues of piracy between students.
I still have a couple drives and a bunch of disks. I keep telling myself I’ll resurrect my college homework for a laugh one day. Unfortunately it’s hard to find a reasonably modern motherboard to hook them up (let alone finding drivers), so in the closet they sit.
I had one. I don’t remember why though… Maybe it came with a PC as part of a sales promotion?
It worked fine but nobody else had one so it was really just used for backups of “large” (at the time) data.
I had a SCSI Zip drive, then later a USB version. Didn’t really need it for myself too much but it helped out for the rare times someone needed to give me something on that format or when I was helping someone with data recovery/data transfer.
Also used to see them around in computer labs & such so they weren’t that rare.
I had one (more than one actually) as it could store soooo much more data than a floppy disk and I needed it to move data (and pirated software) around. At work we had magneto-optic drives with a whopping 240 megs of data, IIRC
I had one at work at one time, and I saved a disc for a long time as a keepsake, but I lost it.
