Where I was it went from 3.5" floppies to USB drives. (There were CDs, but not as easy for things like schoolwork.)
ZIP needed a whole ecosystem of drives, so did you have that?
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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.
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.
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.
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.
Same for me, but add:
- the big ass 8” floppies
- Jaz drives
- Bernoulli drives
So many Bernoulli’s
I had never heard of those until now. 5 1/4 disk size with 230 mb sounds pretty sweet
I use LTO8 tapes every day in 2024 lol
I had a cassette drive on my TI 99/4a.
Now get off my lawn!
I don’t even have a lawn but they need to get off the lawn still!
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.
What about optilithic data rods?
One of the weirder ones was Orb drives/disks.
I still have this and a zip drive in a box. I’d probably need to see if the USB to serial adapter I have works with it though.
My dad used to pirate games and software for us off BBSes. I swear, he would download everything he could find and put it on zip drives. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he’s got a drawer somewhere filled with all the best software 1995 had to offer.
I’d be surprised if the data was still readable. Thrilled to hear, but surprised.
They may fare better than conventional 1.44mb, but I’ve had a hell of a time getting anything before then mid 2000s to read recently.
Magnetic media and writable CDs are pretty damn perishable.
Depends on data density. Still got a c64 with a whole box of 5 1/4" floppy disks. Last time I checked every one I tried worked fine, and they were written about 33 years ago.
When I was in high school, I got a cd burner when they were still somewhat new. Another kid wanted me to burn some mp3s into an audio cd for him, so he lent me his external zip drive loaded up with his mp3.
I feel like zip drives only made sense from around 1995-2000. They filled a gap for writable media at the time.
While in audio engineering school we used all sorts of obscure data storage types, zip being one. Most were DAT tapes and digital reels (2-track, 8, 16, and 24+) with quality that would make FLAC lovers jealous, CDs were used but only for our own personal copies. We also used analog reels. We were made to learn the basics first before moving into computer audio. Fun times.
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.
I’m pretty sure Zip lost out to CD-Rs and -RWs before the thumb drives and better Internet speeds showed up.
Also, I’m not salty at all about minidiscs because fuck Sony and all their proprietary formats.
The coolest thing about mini disc was how it looked like next-level spy shit in movies.
Minidisc was super cool. I never had one, but some of my college friends did and it just seemed so much better than a Discman.
Minidiscs absolutely took off, the format was introduced back in 1992, and discontinued in 2013, that is more than two decades.
They were common in Europe and Japan, I sadly never had one during the height of popularity, but got two used ones back in 2014.
Minidisc is probably the most visualy attractive music format I know of, most players and recorders just look fantastic.
I very nearly bought one back in the day. Instead I opted for an mp3 player with compact flash storage. I believe I was tired of my cd based walkman’s tendency to skip when I was moving so I wanted a smaller, non-moving drive.
Then my dumbass bought one of those compact flash drives with an internal platter harddrive.
My first MP3 player was a Creative Nomad MuVo 64MB, I was one of the first in my school with an MP3 player and since it also was a USB stick I was also one of the first with a USB drive in my school.
But it was nowhere near as sexy as the minidisc recorders and players were
If I got to pick one new recorder and one new player from the entire MD range…
Recorder: Either the MZ-NH1 or the MZ-RH1
Player: Either the MZ-E10, SJ-MJ7 or the DMC-Q55
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?
They were gaining popularity in 1996-1998 I think, but starting from 1999 CD writers became affordable, and zip drives disappeared pretty quickly.
Some companies kept them around as backup solutions, but that stopped early in the 2000s as well. I think the zip cartridges disappeared from the market pretty much all at once.
- 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 …
I still have them, and they still work! I have two drives, one external and one internal zip drive, and probably about 30 or so disks. The real awesome ones which were too expensive for my broke ass back then were the Jaz drives with their crazy 1gb disks.
That’s impressive they’re still running. I got the click of death within a year of ownership on both of mine.
I had a zip drive, jaz drive and a super disk 120mb 3.5" floppy drive at one point.
Yeah they were a thing for a brief while. I still have one in a closet. Do you need one?
The sound of the “Click of Death” still haunts me.
We had Jazz drives too, which just failed and caused you to lose a larger amount of data than a zip.
Yeah it was like an accidental physical computer virus of sorts. Crazy how it was contagious.
Just found an old USB Zip drive and a bunch of Zip disks in a box. Still works!
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.
I tried them, they never seemed quite reliable enough. We used DAT tapes, CR-ROMs, and then just hard drives. At first hard drives in external enclosures then HD docks with bare drives.
