Al Sweigart1d ago

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.

Show threadMike Pirnat
@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.
Apr 8 at 9:05pmWeb
Show threadMike Pirnat1d 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.