Mastodawn

Sometimes I think about zip disks, those 100mb, 250mb (even 1gb!) floppy disks. Were they filling an important niche until burnable CDs became available? Or were they a silly evolutionary dead end, and their presence/absence wouldn't matter in the short or long term?

Who knows. Some things aren't obvious even in hindsight.

Jef Poskanzer 19h ago

@AlSweigart Work gave me a ZIP drive to use for backups. I didn't use it even once.

@AlSweigart they were expensive!

I used them at college and found them handy, before USB drives became ubiquitous.

pizzapal 18h ago

@AlSweigart but will people pay a bunch of money for them now, like CRT monitors?

Jim Jones 15h ago

@pizzapal @AlSweigart Let me know. I have a big box of still-in-shrink disks that I got in surplus sale.

@AlSweigart They were definitely more convenient than juggling around dozends of 3.5 inch floppy disks only to find out that the last one you need isunreadable.

@AlSweigart I never used Zip disks myself, but my memory is that they were readily available around the same time that writable CD drives were becoming widely available in the consumer market.

I remember a single Zip disk costing substantially more than a stack of blank CDs.

I assume that Zip disks were sort of the natural evolution of the removal magnetic media, but were not well positioned to compete with cheap optical storage

Mike Pirnat 14h ago

@dave881 @AlSweigart CD burners were still rare and pricey in Zip’s mid-90s heyday.

@AlSweigart Innovation. Becoming a rare thing these days.

Nobody knows what works or not until things shake out after the fact.

Kiki Buber 18h ago

@AlSweigart It beat breaking up design file releases over multiple floppies, but nobody ever returned them, no matter how nice were the stickers were put on them. And they were expensive!Towards the end there was starting to be an unspoken agreement that agencies and printers would just keep them in flow, so you always had an assortment of somebody else’s disks…

LittleFrank 17h ago

@AlSweigart I remember our Head of Department persuading students to buy the disks because he got free drives as part of a package deal.

@AlSweigart They were really useful for me at the time - bringing software updates to customers who had offline computers - which were still really common then. Also backups that were more capacity than a floppy, but without the outlay and complexity of a digital tape drive.

JAZ drives landed too closely to the CDRW to get much traction, but I used one in my lab for years to swap OSs.

Passenger 16h ago

I had a friend who had some zipdisks, and a zip drive to read them.

He used to come around to people's houses and temporarily install the zip drive on their computer, so that he could then help people to install their choice of w4r3z from the zipdisks. A plug and play hard disk would have been better, but the hard disks we had then didn't like to be jostled around in a backpack.

We basically independently invented the concept of a sneakernet, except it was my friend Ed and his zip drive.

Passenger 16h ago

I had a friend who had some zipdisks, and a zip drive to read them.

He used to come around to people's houses and temporarily install the zip drive on their computer, so that he could then help people to install their choice of w4r3z from the zipdisks. A plug and play hard disk would have been better, but the hard disks we had then didn't like to be jostled around in a backpack.

We basically independently invented the concept of a sneakernet, except it was my friend Ed and his zip drive.

Jim Jones 15h ago

@AlSweigart I loved zip disks. They had a satisfying bulk to them.

Mike Pirnat 14h ago

@AlSweigart If you did work at multiple computers at different physical locations, Zip disks were great! It was how I brought the data I needed between my dorm room, computer labs, my student job, etc. They were cheap and ubiquitous, and so helpful in an age where we didn’t have cloud storage and not every computer had internet access or the network was slow.

Mike Pirnat 14h ago

@AlSweigart I think about them kind of like 8-tracks and cassette tapes. They solved a problem decently enough until the next thing came along to displace them.