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.
@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
Al Sweigart
David
Mike Pirnat