In all these nostalgic retrospectives, I never read how the zip drive can achieve 100x or more capacity than the floppy. What is the engineering feat that allowed this? There's one paragraph in Wikipedia that says the heads fly across the disk like a hard drive. OK, how did they manage that while the disk isn't sealed? Is that all it took?
Similarly, articles just gloss right over the "click of death" without any technical explanation of what goes wrong. Why were these drives and/or media so prone to failure?
> I never read how the zip drive can achieve 100x or more capacity than the floppy. What is the engineering feat that allowed this?
Improvement in production processes and materials (e.g. magnetic coatings) allowing smaller tracks and smaller more precisely positioned heads. The 3 1/2 floppy dates back to 1983, the high-density 1.44MB to 1986, the Zip drive was released in 1994.
A “super high density” 20 MB floppy had already been attempted in 1990, and the LS-120, which had the exact same dimensions as a 3.5” floppy (and could read those), launched in 1996, so it was not really exceptional at 6 doubling in 8 years from the 1.44MB floppy.
Also it was expensive, part of that was the lower scale and lack of competition but the increased production requirements were also a factor, Zip drives and media had tighter tolerances.
The click of death was because when the head got misaligned the drive would return it to the home position, if part of the drive had failed the head would never realign so the drive would keep trying, producing a characteristic clicking sound. HDDs can develop the same, but it’s less common than it was on Zip drives. The tighter tolerance were most likely a factor, it was more likely for a zip to age out of tolerance and develop terminal misalignment.
> Improvement in production processes and materials (e.g. magnetic coatings) allowing smaller tracks
Improvements in coatings improve the data per track, but no improvement was needed for increasing the amount of tracks. On a 1.44MB drive there are 100 000 bits per track, but only 80 tracks per side. Or, in other terms, the length of a single bit along the track (on the innermost track) was ~1.2µm, and the width of that same bit, sideways to the track, was ~200µm, for an aspect ratio of 166:1. As far as the media was concerned, roughly 10:1 aspect ratio would have been more than enough, or a normal 1.44MB floppy could have supported more than a 1000 tracks per side.
The limiting factor was that old floppies had no way for the head to follow the track, it was just indexed into a fixed position by the drive mechanism. This meant that the tracks had to be ridiculously wide to support all the possible misalignment on both the reader and the writer. To improve track density, what was needed was some mechanism to make the head locate the tracks and follow them as the disk rotated under them. Iomega solved this by etching shallow concentric circles for the tracks on the surface of the disc. These rings were essentially invisible for the magnetic head, but allowed a separate laser to pick the up and follow them.
The real click of death was when this was due to a catastrophic failure - say, one of the heads had become completely dislodged and was suddenly hanging loose. Then, every single cartridge you inserted into such a drive would be damaged. If you then took that cartridge and inserted it into a fully working drive, it had a good chance of subsequently destroying that drive.
Steve Gibson has a good site with historical information from the time when these drives were still marketed and sold: https://www.grc.com/tip/codfaq1.htm
The real question is why were 1.44mb 3 1/2" floppy drives used for so long when they were totally obsolete by 1990. I would love to read a more coherent and unified history; my understanding is that there were tons of competing higher-capacity 3 1/2" drives between ~1985 and 1995, but software developers were stuck releasing on 1.44mb because that was the only format which worked reliably across manufacturers. By the time Zip drive came out, software was distributed on CD and higher-capacity floppies were really only used for (geographically) local data transfer.
Wikipedia says there was a serious attempt to standardize a 20mb floppy in 1990 which fell apart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk#High-capacity It's really not the case that Zip made some great leap forward; 15 years of technology's steady march didn't fully trickle down to consumer hardware because of compatibility issues between competing manufacturers.
3.5 inch already peaked in 1985, thats when NEC first shipped 1.44MB inside PC-8801 mkII MR. IBM followed two years later switching PS/2 to HD floppies, Apple in 1988. 80 tracks ~50KB/s speed. In 1990 IBM bumped PS/2 to 2.88 ED. Different magnetic material, double the bitrate, ~100KB/s.
... But NEC beat IBM by already doing 'five blades' in 1988 selling PC-88 VA3 with 'Triple' or '2TD' format 3.5" floppy sporting 13MB unformatted 9MB formatted capacity. Same perpendicular head as ED, same magnetic medium, same bitrate, 3 times more tracks (240) while still using cheap stepper motor unlike ZIP head actuators, compatible with same standard ED floppy controller chips. Sadly no one in the west adopted it :(((
There was one more avenue for bumping capacity never really explored on PC - zone bit recording invented by Chuck Peddle in 1961 and supported by Floppy controllers in Macintoshes, Commodore (Chuck Peddle designed drives) and Victor 9000 (Chuck Peddle designed whole computer). Free 50% capacity bump. Victor 9000 pulled 1.2MB capacity out of Double Density 80 track 5 1/4 drive.
Combine 2TD wiht ZBR and we could have had cheap 13.5MB formatted capacity floppies since 1988.
That's kind of the point of my comment - software developers couldn't release on NEC without excluding IBM customers etc etc. They were stuck with 1.44MB because that was the only thing guaranteed to work. There was a human management problem around agreeing on a specification; drive manufacturers and software companies simply had conflicting incentives, so the market was a mess.
In retrospect I think the only reason Zip was able to become the undisputed market leader in high-capacity disks is that CD-ROM fully took over commercial software distribution.
Zip disks were much less floppy than floppies. They felt more similar to a single magnetic hard disk platen. Presumably the stiffness was what enabled the head to float above the medium, while also allowing tighter read/write timing because it wasn't subject to such variation. Having a single manufacturer of the disks (at least initially) probably also helped.
Zip drives were great while they were great. I had one and it was amazing at the time. What was even more amazing, is that Toshiba Libretto in the photo. I wanted one since the first time I saw it, and into the early 2000 as a linux/retro machine and never got one. And even though today that form factor is not that special... Still...
Drives like these and the Syquest drives were essential for desktop publishing well into the early 2000s. I sent many such drives to various printing facilities --- or, sometimes (and, here, I really date myself) separate PostScript bureaus --- to obtain high-res, color-separated film for four-color commercial printing, either by local printers or magazines who would run ads for my employers of the time.
I was just trying to remember the Syquest name. I remembered their products being popular in mac labs (I was a teen at that time).
For a while I badly wanted a zip drive or the (syquest) ez 135 for personal use. But by the time I could afford that stuff I had a scsi board and cd writer… which was clearly the way.
Speaking of backup solutions, why don't we ever see pro-sumer priced tape drives? The technology behind capable LTO drives is now more than 10 years old, shouldn't we see some reductions in price now?
> why don't we ever see pro-sumer priced tape drives? The technology behind capable LTO drives is now more than 10 years old, shouldn't we see some reductions in price now
First, LTO drives are conceptually simple, but if you've ever opened one up you'll know they are a feat of horribly complex engineering.
Second, they are not a commodity product. Infact thanks to the magic cloud they are even LESS of a commodity product than they were 10 years ago because lots of people have either wholesale moved to the cloud or use S3 for backup.
1 + 2 = Low volume product with lots of parts crammed into it = high manufacturing cost = high price.
The orgs who still use LTO in their infra are the sort of orgs who don't blink at the price tag. The cost of the CTO's farts is probably more than a 5k tape drive.
Back in the era when Zip drives were around, there was a prosumer/SMB tape standard: 1/4-inch QIC. I sold many PCs with a tape drive in one of the drive bays. They were awesome.
They also sucked from a support point of view. People would mistreat the tape. Store them next to giant magnets or on top of the microwave in the restaurant. Forget to run the weekly backup and then blame you when they lost files. I couldn't wait to get them on to CD-RW which showed up for SMBs very soon afterwards in the late 1990s, and then eventually to the cloud. What a relief to no longer need magnetic media.
The irony now is that many of the SMBs I see today (though I no longer consult for them) have effectively zero backup because all their business process is tied up in a SaaS that they do not control. Eg their website is on squarespace, their tasks are on Asana, and their finances are in Quickbooks. Any one of these goes dark, or out of business, or is vandalized and it's curtains for the whole business.
My experience with tape is very out of date but I doubt much has changed due to the nature of tape
Tape software sucks. Tape restores are cumbersome. A SMB can literally but a multi TB HDD and just drag and drop, and but the drive in a safe.
A SMB will need to hire someone who wants to deal with this niche tape storage, and why would they bother if they can use a NAS for that and a dozen other things at the same time
Tapes can have a shelf life of 30 years. If you need archival storage then tape is a great solution. For everybody else it’s more trouble than it’s worth.
How many of them have actual need for terabytes of storage? And I mean business continuity critical one.
Overall they are much better of buying a few external HDDs. Standard interface, sufficient capacity. Just get trusted person to carry one out every month or three months. For continuous stuff just have NAS.
> millions of small-to-medium businesses that could use a good and cheap backup solution for terabytes of data.
Yes, and that's exactly how small-to-medium business IT used to operate.
These days sadly most small-to-medium businesses are drinking the cloud koolaid.
You would be hard pushed to find a small-biz with a comms room these days, when back in the day every half-decent small-biz office would have a comms room with cab and a few servers in it.
Now most small-biz are on Microsoft or Gmail for mail and their office is full of laptops on WiFi.... nobody has any respect for good old-fashioned structured cabling these days either, sadly. ;(
It is what it is, sadly.
Hence only governments, enterprises and, ironically (if rumours are correct) the cloud providers (for their archival S3 products) are still buying tape.
Unfortunately, I never got around to using it! I bought it with high hopes, but my Zip disks turned out to be so convenient and spacious that the VHS-backup need never arose.
That said, it's not too late... I still have my Amiga system in storage, and a VHS recorder.
>I bought it with high hopes, but my Zip disks turned out to be so convenient and spacious that the VHS-backup need never arose.
It's good to hear, in retrospect, that you were able to use a storage medium that did not even exist when Amiga were discontinued. Which type of interface for the Zip drive works with it?
(It occurs to me that Zip disks presumably offer the great virtue, otherwise absent as I understand it for Amigans, of PC compatibility.)
When Zip drives hit the market, I already had a SyQuest drive and the Zip drive didn't have much more capacity and its parallel interface was slower than my computer's SCSI interface. I assumed Zip disks would be less reliable than hard disks, as floppy disks had been.
The SyQuest had a real hard drive platter in it so you knew it was robust. The Zip platter was harder than a floppy but softer than a hard drive, so you knew it wasn't as robust.
So I had no incentive to buy into Zip. I saw a few people use them but I assumed they'd never heard of SyQuest and didn't know better. I never had anyone ask for data on a Zip disk or want to give me data on a Zip disk, so I never bothered.
Later when the click-of-death started happening, I figured it would die off and people would switch to SyQuest, but then there was Jaz, which wasn't as popular as Zip, and then CD-ROM took over, which held a lot of data, but was still slow (in spite of IDE) and still not as robust as the SyQuest products.
In 1998, at their end, SyQuest had a 4.7 GB unit, I presume to compete with DVD.
SyQuest and Iomega were both founded in the early '80s and introduced their first removable disk products in 1982, and both introduced cost-reduced consumer-oriented drives in 1995 (EZ135 and Zip, respectively).
IIRC, Iomega captured the consumer market with the Zip drive for mostly business reasons (better marketing, contracts with major retailers and PC OEMs, etc.).
I worked at a university bookstore and we sold lots of disks. while CDs were killing them for long-term storage zips were required for some courses because RW disks suck.
those zip disks were not cheap 10$-15$ each for a paltry 100mb.
the rise of USB sticks really killed them. you could get a 128mb usb stick for similar or cheaper and you didn't need the clunky unreliable zip drive to use them.
Iomega's earlier offering, the Bernoulli Box (I had a few of these), was a solid, dependable removable storage product, though the media was expensive and physically rather large.
The Zip drives that followed were abysmal. We sold a lot of them initially (I was working in a computer store in the early nineties), but sales cratered once the "click of death" became infamous. SyQuest drives suffered from similar reliability issues.
The founder of SyQuest, Syed Iftikhar, later left and set up another company called Castlewood, which introduced yet another removable drive called the Orb. The Orb was genuinely faster and more reliable than anything Iomega or SyQuest had offered.
But with the advent of cheap flash drives and faster broadband internet, transfer and storage of data shifted decisively away from spinning removable media, and the entire category quietly died, taking Castlewood, Iomega, Imation, and SyQuest with it.
I bought one of these. In those days, I could keep the JDK in a box of floppies or it could fit in one Zip. Unfortunately, you had to carry your drive with you, because few people had one. So it only really made sense as backup media for me.
It was probably very localized, where my parent worked in the late 90s every office room had at least one, so my parents also bought one for home so they could easily transfer files.
It almost dissapeares overnight once 32MB+ usb drives became common, much more convenenient.
I remember really wanting one of these but I'm not really sure for what purpose. The idea of a substantial amount of data off a HDD seemed very appealing, and it was around that time where 1.44mb floppies were no longer sufficient but most people didn't have a CD-RW drive yet. Later in the 90s as CD-RW drives replaced CD-ROM drives there wasn't really a need for Zip drives.
So it seems like to me they had an extremely short window to operate without much competition. CD-Rs being about $15 for a spindle and 6.5x the space was an easy pick.
Zip drives were very cool, and even cooler, my folks owned a Powerbook G3 at the time, which allowed hot swapping a Zip drive into the expansion bay (in place of floppy/CD/battery)
I'd offer an alternative take, though it's not completely incompatible with the article: They are an example of the fact that you can buy putting your product on front of lots of people, but you can't buy keeping it there. It has to be good on its own merit to survive. Or at least, it gets more and more expensive to hold it in front of people.
It was, in a lot of ways, too early. I never had one, and I never missed having one. I had other solutions to the problems when they happened. By the time I had the problem, it was not a cost-effective solution.
I know people can pop up and say that it solved some problems for them, but I think the people who it solved problems for, in proportion to the price, weren't enough of a market. By the time they were, CD burners were a much cheaper solution.
If they were 1/4 the price, it might have been a different story... but the price was pretty fundamental to the tech.
You can't buy success. You can buy initial success, but not long term success. By the standards of such products, Zip was relatively successful, because it did have some people it solved a problem for. It was just a minority of their customer base. Enough to hang on for a while, but not to take over the world.
I worked in a university computer lab in the late 90s and these drives were very popular. Burning a CD was not a similar solution.
People needed primary portable storage and Zip drives were amazing solutions before USB drives.
The school gave each student just 15MB of storage for their email account, which was also their homedir storage for any other school project
But the labs had at least a few stations with Zip drives
The article quotes a pretty low failure rate overall but I suspect college students were seeing these fail a lot more because they just threw the disks in their bags and walked around to class all day. Having to deal with someone whose only copy of their work was on one of these triggers a traumatic response in me.
Those were exactly the people I was thinking of when I said it didn't bring enough value. Yes, plenty of students saw a Zip drive bay in their school computers and bought it on the theory that if it was there the schools must know what they were doing and it was a "requirement" of one sort or another. It didn't occur to them that the Zip drives were there because Iomega probably bought their way in, rather than because they were actually a vital tool.
And students may have gotten some minimal, non-zero utility from it, but almost everything they would have been doing at the time would have fit on a floppy disk just fine. Maybe two. The Zip drive was slightly more convenient... for about $150 more. Aroud $300 inflation-adjusted.
That's not $300's worth of value, and especially not $300's worth of value for a college student. I can manage a couple of floppies and "that one time I had a really big project" for $300 as a college student.
Yes, I'm sure you have a story of that one guy who had an 80MB project that fit no other way. But think of all the people who had 96% empty drives because all their documents were tiny that don't come to mind.
You will note that there was no cohort of people coming out of college demanding Zip drives everywhere else in the world after them, because I doubt very many of your students came away with a strongly positive impression of the Zip drive, even for those for whom it worked perfectly.
Zip drives arrived at exactly the same time as digital art, the web, and most importantly Macromedia Flash. Maybe the CS people with a few source code files didn’t fully use the space, but the art kids certainly did.
There simply was no other option at the time than Zip drives. Others did not strike the right balance of price, capacity, responsiveness, etc. Maybe Iomega paid to get them installed, I don’t know, but there really was no other option so I can easily see schools buying them just because they needed a solution.
USB thumb drives started appearing not long after, and they didn’t suffer from the click of death, so those became the preferred media by the time those people graduated school.
There is no question that Zip Drives succeeded by dominating the shelves of every computer store I ever shopped at. They had a massive share of that all-important real-estate.
This was a market where people were building PCs from no-name components in plain wrapping. Most everything I ordered was out of the back of a trade rag with classified ads that were nothing but tight listings of part numbers and prices. Zip Drive was akin to SoundBlaster in its uniquely flashy, colorful packaging, branded hardware offering.
I eschewed them for a while, and when SyQuest came out with a PC-compatible (and SCSI-compatible) competitor, I picked that up instead. Why? Because SyQuest had imprinted their brand on me when I saw every serious Apple user with a SyQuest on their desk or in their pocket. I knew that this was a tacit testimony of reliability. SyQuest had the necessary experience and R&D already in place to provide quality and reliability, where Zip had none of that reputation.
My SyQuest never failed or clicked, although it became obsolete at the same rate as the Zips. I never regretted not having a Zip drive, for sure!
Physical media is the answer to content overload: it has a thingness that the ephemera of online digital content does not. Its physical nature allows for artistic expression on and in the thing. The act of insertion and removal provides a psychological gate between "starting", "doing" and "finishing".
It is the opposite of The Eternal Scroll. It is the hero we need.
I was there in the mid- to late nineties writing computer books and doing the typesetting myself on QuarkXPress (in the prehistoric era before InDesign existed), back in an era where you'd enter a bookshop and 95%+ of the book and magazines were typeset on QuarkXPress on a Mac.
ZIP drives were too expensive for freshly post-Communist Czechia. A FDD would cost about USD 40-50, much more affordable than the ZIP drive with its 200 USD price tag. And the media were much cheaper, especially if you bought no-name diskettes for, say, USD 2-3. This way, you could discard a bad medium without feeling the economic pinch too much. Discarding a 20 USD ZIP medium would be quite painful.
I think I only saw two computers with ZIP drives in the wild, so to say. Which created its own anti-network effects: if there is no expectation of the other party having a compatible drive, you will either have to do with floppies, or maybe carry an external HDD with you, but you won't use an exotic and expensive format. Pretty much the only plausible use was backup.
I still believe that with a more aggressive price policy, ZIPs could have conquered a lot of territory in the 1990s. But 200/20 USD was just too much money to spend. Not just in the post-Soviet bloc, but almost everywhere in Asia, too. Big markets lost because of the cost, and therefore a chance to entrench the standard worldwide.
They were like a 3-4 year fad while also CD burners were coming online so they did not really provide a significant storage medium because if you wanted large sizes, you typically just needed readonly CDs.
Needing large and Read-Write was the niche than CD-R and CD-RW did much better. Along with CDs in general, they just didn't do much more than span a small temporal gap in value proposition.
I used a Zip drive with an Akai MPC 2000 over SCSI to store all my songs and sounds. Loved it! Never had a problem with it, and I didn't exactly look after it well. The MPC itself still had the builtin floppy drive, and the zip just blew the floppy away in speed and capacity.
That me reminds me of installing a SCSI Zip drive into my roommate's Akai S5000 or S6000 sampler. He and I repeatedly debated whether or not hardware samplers would eventually lose out to software solutions. He was absolutely convinced that there was no way in hell that the precision of hardware solutions would ever lose out to the flexibility of software. In the end, I was right, I'm pretty sure the S5000 and S6000 were some of the last truly hardware samplers of the era. Still, that Akai was a sexy bit of kit back then. As sure as I was that software would eventually win out it was sad to see the amazing engineering and precision of the hardware that was finally overtaken.
They filled the gap when CD-R/CD-RW was crazy expensive and people needed more storage space. The cd-r/rw drives drives dropping in price killed it. I believe they later had a 200 or 250 mb drive, the Jaz. I think places that needed big storage used tapes.
There was also the issue that one would also need a reader. Why would I buy a zip reader if no one else has one (network effect)? (Btw I never saw in my life a zip reader or a zip disk.)
Whereas with USB sticks all one needed was a USB port. I immediately wanted a stick.
Partially this was solved by the ZipDrive being designed for portability as well (I'm not even sure if there was ever a built in model). So if you needed to copy a large file and take it to a friends house you just took the drive with you.
Most of us were using Zip drives to backup our files and then put the disks on shelf. There was no cloud backup, and 100MB was often enough for all your personal files.
It was also used by professional who needed to transfer large (for the times) amounts of data but not so much or without the technical background that high density tapes or routinely swapping hard drives was sensible (or possible): images, document scans, …
Before the first iMac arrived with only USB ports and thereby forced peripheral makers to support USB, USB just wasn't all that common even in the Windows world: why would a 1997 manufacturer bother with USB when all the machines already had all the other ports we here in 2026 find subsumed into USB?
But only a few years later, as you say, USB thumb drives were making Zip drives irrelevant.
USB was slooooooow in comparison to SCSI or later FireWire, though, so that took a hardware generations to really catch on.
I think the network effect was more a question of who had tons of data: for example, all of the graphic design shops had Zip or Jazz drives because they needed to schlep client deliverables around so you could just assume they had the hardware. Most people weren’t generating that much data before digital cameras became common.
Was it really the iMac that did it? I don't think I remember anyone saying that until recent years. Around the time of the first iMac, just about every home PC already had a pair of USB 1.1 ports because of Windows 98 and a lot more plug and play support.
What I recall being sold for Mac were FireWire peripherals back in the late 90s and most of the 2000s. By 2000, USB 2.0 was too good to ignore and addressed all the pain points manufacturers had with USB 1.1 being too slow. That's when I remember USB drives finally being practical and mainstream.
IIRC, the Mac magazines I read at the time were making this claim.
The magazines may have been wrong and their claims turned into an urban legend in the meantime, but it's part of the general sense of what I recall from, ugh, nearly 30 years back now.
The iMac certainly accelerated the adoption curve. There were USB ports on other PCs, but since they also had normal (at the time) ports, no PC users were going out and buying all-new USB peripherals.
Apple's decision to leave out all the other ports meant that a bunch of folks were forced to buy new USB peripherals (and/or adapters), and gave peripheral manufacturers a dedicated market for USB
I don't but this. The first 2 generations of iPod didn't even have USB connectors, only FireWire, which was a PITA as most PCs had a USB connection by that time but FireWire wasn't common as opposed to Mac.
I don't think that runs contrary to my point in any way?
By the time the iPod came around, Apple had adopted FireWire to handle devices that USB's then-limited bandwidth couldn't really support. USB peripherals like mouse/keyboards were already pretty widespread by then.
Sure. The point I was claiming was not Apple being first nor early USB being good, though I don't speak for swiftcoder.
When Firewire was introduced, it wasn't ever popular enough to get the self-sustaining popularity loop of "all the machines have it" <-> "all the peripheral makers support it".
Apple made that happen for USB. Not because USB was amazing in 1997, but because it was the only thing on what was then the cheapest new Mac.
Yup I do think that's true for Mac users, and questioning Apple fans' just-so stories are usually worthwhile to anyone curious. They sure do keep history alive and well. I mean, hey, The Beatles made an entire career out of doing that with their fans!
I just realized this month was Apple's 50th anniversary, so that's likely part of why this is making the rounds. I guess I have my answer.
Indeed. So bad that no one apart from Apple would have tried to go all-in on it. I doubt things like USB mice and keyboards would ever have happened if Apple didn't give it a kick in the behind
Firewire was indeed a nice addition when that came along, but it always remained the domain of pricey high-bandwidth devices.
I did some more digging to find out that the infamous BSOD demo with Bill Gates on stage was meant to show off plug and play on Windows 98. It was caused by a USB scanner.
This happened 4 months before the release date of the first iMac.
Yeah, I mean, I don't disagree with any of this, I just don't think any vendor in the PC world was prepared to rip the PS/2 and serial ports off their motherboards, and tell all the peripheral manufacturers to go take a hike
Zip drives were revolutionary for 100mb and then 250mb storage, at the same time that many people gained widespread access to the Internet. But they were proprietary and required you to have an external drive available to write or read from them (and that might also mean a SCSI port).
So when affordable CD-R became available, even though early drives were slow writers, they had the advantage that they could be read from practically any computer. With ubiquitous non-proprietary CD-ROM drives and the huge 700mb capacity, Zip drives were tossed as soon as someone bought a CD-R drive.
At the height of first phase of using Macs between 1992 and 1998 having an Mac LCII and later a PowerMac 6100/60, I had a 5 device SCSI chain including a Zip Drive and later a Jaz drive (1GB removable drive) along with two hard drives and CDROM drive.
I remember that the biggest problems with Zip drives was that most Windows PCs didn’t come with SCSI and that they had some Frankenstein parallel port version.
For context when I bought my Zip drive, my internal hard drive was only 80MB and part of that was used as an emulated hard drive for my Apple //e card.
I loved my zip drive it was loud but I loved that it had my stuff on it and there was no need to compromise on what I would keep or trash, which itself was part of the attachment to this new thing
zip-drives where great - at least compared to what other possibilities where around these days:
overall, zip-drives where not that expensive, especially the medias.
but they died every now& then ...
so it was more or less only a possibility to transfer data, not so much to archive it! this was what cd-r and later dvd-r where there for :)
imho. the "real" problem where often the drives themselfs, they where available with various interfaces, the most common was (!) parallel / "printer-port" / centronics (!) .. veeery slow.
the "best" ones had scsi =?> fast etc. but you needed an scsi-controller with an external connector for that
if i remember it correctly, there where even IDE/PATA-drives available - but i think only internal ones - and later usb-variants (also slow) ...
btw. what where the alternative in the late 1990ties!?
* syquests
great drives, especially the 5.25 inch variants, but they where already "dated" by then. and the 3.5 inch variants where pretty expensive and had reliability-issues ...
additionally: lots of people mistook the 3,5 inch variants for floppy-disk-drives and ruined early models by inserting floppies into them =?> the later got some mechanical protection against that!
* (old) harddisks
my "medium of choice" where old hdds, which i plugged into the machines between which i wanted to transfer data ...
by far the "best" option, but also the most "technical" one ;)
Magneto-optical drives are what I miss! The nearest thing we ever had to a durable and useable long-term storage media for normal users, as far as I know.
While I owned and used several Zip drives back in the day, the first thing that came to mind when I saw this post was the final scene of Zoolander, where a Zip disk backup of incriminating files saves the day.
Interesting that in that time all kind of external storage solutions emerged: I used Zip drives, the follow-up "Jaz drive" (1GB) and Syquest disks (270 MB?). The latter two chained together with thick SCSI cables to a PowerMac 7200.
Edit: Today I use just 2.5" SSDs in the same way. There's a small sata to usb-c adapter where I plug them in without any further enclosure.
We had a SCSI zip-drive at our uni and it was a brilliant way to drag megabytes of content home. Even though I had amazing internet (2Mbit shared by 100+ ppl), the zip drive would still be a good way of getting stuff home.
Then I got to experience the click of death and the internet connection was bumped to 100Mbit and I didn't need to replace my zip drive.
They were the best way to pirate software from work, like Photoshop and illustrator.
I also learned a 90's bubble investment tip on TV that if you went to the companies office and night and all the lights were on they were cooking and worth investing in. And the TV investor said he visited Iomega and they were cooking.
That was exactly the experience I had - there was a very narrow window where ZIP drives were the best option, but once you had some they hung around into the early 2000s.
I knew a bunch of Mac graphic design people that used Zip disks into the 2000's because they had to transfer huge files and the Zip discs were rewritable unlike CD-R. Rewriting a CD-RW is clunky compared to a Zip disk.
I actually bought one of these Panasonic PD Phase-change Dual drives in 1995. It was $500 and the cartridges were $30 for 650MB. I formatted them as ext2 and used the standard cp / mv / rm commands. This technology later evolved into the DVD-RAM standard. DVD-RW and DVD+RW were very different.
Zip disks continued in their niche until USB sticks were large enough and reliable enough - because of that ability to use them as a disk - there were some packages that claimed to turn a CD-RW (or even a CD-R using append) into something that pretended to be editable, but they weren't great.
Macs did much better with removable drives for years since the users were used to "ejecting" the disk instead of just pulling it out.
Back around 1999 I tested some patches from Linux kernel hacker Jens Axboe that added packet writing support. This enabled DVD+RW discs to look like normal drives and you didn't have to make an ISO image and burn it.
And in my googling for those links I find that Jens is still the block device maintainer and submitted a patch in 2025 to remove support for packet writing.
> "This driver has long outlived it's utility, and it's broken and unloved. The main use case for this was direct mount with UDF of cd-rw drives that required 32kb packets. It would collect writes into that size and write them out in multiples of that. That's not a common use case anymore, the world has moved on from those kinds of media. To make matters worse, it's actively breaking setups where it's not even required or useful."
There was a pretty short window where it was more useful than just dedicating 700mb of cache on the hard drive, about the time that CDs could easily be larger than your hard drive.
> Why Zip drives dominated the 90s, then vanished almost overnight
This is such an odd take to me.
I sold and supported computers in the 1990s. Outside of a few industries, such as desktop publishing, Zip was not popular. The vast majority of computer owners never owned a Zip drive, unlike a floppy or soon to be CDROM.
In fact, I sold far more QIC-80 tape drives for backups than Zip drives.
Zip also didn't vanish overnight, it simple never caught on with most people. However, in the industries that used them, they hung on for a while.
For awhile, the Ontario Health Insurance Program allowed physicians to submit their billing in person via zip drive. I remember depositing the disks for my parents (funny the things one remembers)
This was the time between paper billing and digital submissions.
The other "has been" technology of the era was the "LS-120 SuperDisk". It was backwards compatible with standard 1.44MB 3.5" disks but you could buy special disks with 120MB capacity, and you didn't need to take up two slots on your front bays for both floppy and zip (and could write back to standard 1.44MB disks when taking some files to campus or sharing with "normal" computers). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperDisk
...in retrospect as the article states: swept away by CD-rw and USB sticks, but a great technology! There really was a critical gap in "I need to back up _all_ my files or coursework for the semester" or "Wouldn't it be great to be able to fit TEN games on a floppy instead of ONE game on ten floppies?"
they never dominated the 90s, someone is trying hard to rewrite history, when someone was sharing something with me they used either 3.5" floppies or CDR, never in my life I held in hands zip drives, neither did anyone I know
up until mid 90s it was floppies, then since mid 90s it was CDR
it's like saying minidiscs dominated the 90s, which would be as stupid
In all these nostalgic retrospectives, I never read how the zip drive can achieve 100x or more capacity than the floppy. What is the engineering feat that allowed this? There's one paragraph in Wikipedia that says the heads fly across the disk like a hard drive. OK, how did they manage that while the disk isn't sealed? Is that all it took?
Similarly, articles just gloss right over the "click of death" without any technical explanation of what goes wrong. Why were these drives and/or media so prone to failure?
There's nothing new in this article.
> I never read how the zip drive can achieve 100x or more capacity than the floppy. What is the engineering feat that allowed this?
Improvement in production processes and materials (e.g. magnetic coatings) allowing smaller tracks and smaller more precisely positioned heads. The 3 1/2 floppy dates back to 1983, the high-density 1.44MB to 1986, the Zip drive was released in 1994.
A “super high density” 20 MB floppy had already been attempted in 1990, and the LS-120, which had the exact same dimensions as a 3.5” floppy (and could read those), launched in 1996, so it was not really exceptional at 6 doubling in 8 years from the 1.44MB floppy.
Also it was expensive, part of that was the lower scale and lack of competition but the increased production requirements were also a factor, Zip drives and media had tighter tolerances.
The click of death was because when the head got misaligned the drive would return it to the home position, if part of the drive had failed the head would never realign so the drive would keep trying, producing a characteristic clicking sound. HDDs can develop the same, but it’s less common than it was on Zip drives. The tighter tolerance were most likely a factor, it was more likely for a zip to age out of tolerance and develop terminal misalignment.
> Improvement in production processes and materials (e.g. magnetic coatings) allowing smaller tracks
Improvements in coatings improve the data per track, but no improvement was needed for increasing the amount of tracks. On a 1.44MB drive there are 100 000 bits per track, but only 80 tracks per side. Or, in other terms, the length of a single bit along the track (on the innermost track) was ~1.2µm, and the width of that same bit, sideways to the track, was ~200µm, for an aspect ratio of 166:1. As far as the media was concerned, roughly 10:1 aspect ratio would have been more than enough, or a normal 1.44MB floppy could have supported more than a 1000 tracks per side.
The limiting factor was that old floppies had no way for the head to follow the track, it was just indexed into a fixed position by the drive mechanism. This meant that the tracks had to be ridiculously wide to support all the possible misalignment on both the reader and the writer. To improve track density, what was needed was some mechanism to make the head locate the tracks and follow them as the disk rotated under them. Iomega solved this by etching shallow concentric circles for the tracks on the surface of the disc. These rings were essentially invisible for the magnetic head, but allowed a separate laser to pick the up and follow them.
The real click of death was when this was due to a catastrophic failure - say, one of the heads had become completely dislodged and was suddenly hanging loose. Then, every single cartridge you inserted into such a drive would be damaged. If you then took that cartridge and inserted it into a fully working drive, it had a good chance of subsequently destroying that drive.
Steve Gibson has a good site with historical information from the time when these drives were still marketed and sold: https://www.grc.com/tip/codfaq1.htm
The real question is why were 1.44mb 3 1/2" floppy drives used for so long when they were totally obsolete by 1990. I would love to read a more coherent and unified history; my understanding is that there were tons of competing higher-capacity 3 1/2" drives between ~1985 and 1995, but software developers were stuck releasing on 1.44mb because that was the only format which worked reliably across manufacturers. By the time Zip drive came out, software was distributed on CD and higher-capacity floppies were really only used for (geographically) local data transfer.
Wikipedia says there was a serious attempt to standardize a 20mb floppy in 1990 which fell apart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk#High-capacity It's really not the case that Zip made some great leap forward; 15 years of technology's steady march didn't fully trickle down to consumer hardware because of compatibility issues between competing manufacturers.
3.5 inch already peaked in 1985, thats when NEC first shipped 1.44MB inside PC-8801 mkII MR. IBM followed two years later switching PS/2 to HD floppies, Apple in 1988. 80 tracks ~50KB/s speed. In 1990 IBM bumped PS/2 to 2.88 ED. Different magnetic material, double the bitrate, ~100KB/s.
... But NEC beat IBM by already doing 'five blades' in 1988 selling PC-88 VA3 with 'Triple' or '2TD' format 3.5" floppy sporting 13MB unformatted 9MB formatted capacity. Same perpendicular head as ED, same magnetic medium, same bitrate, 3 times more tracks (240) while still using cheap stepper motor unlike ZIP head actuators, compatible with same standard ED floppy controller chips. Sadly no one in the west adopted it :(((
There was one more avenue for bumping capacity never really explored on PC - zone bit recording invented by Chuck Peddle in 1961 and supported by Floppy controllers in Macintoshes, Commodore (Chuck Peddle designed drives) and Victor 9000 (Chuck Peddle designed whole computer). Free 50% capacity bump. Victor 9000 pulled 1.2MB capacity out of Double Density 80 track 5 1/4 drive.
Combine 2TD wiht ZBR and we could have had cheap 13.5MB formatted capacity floppies since 1988.
That's kind of the point of my comment - software developers couldn't release on NEC without excluding IBM customers etc etc. They were stuck with 1.44MB because that was the only thing guaranteed to work. There was a human management problem around agreeing on a specification; drive manufacturers and software companies simply had conflicting incentives, so the market was a mess.
In retrospect I think the only reason Zip was able to become the undisputed market leader in high-capacity disks is that CD-ROM fully took over commercial software distribution.
>software developers couldn't release on NEC without excluding IBM customers
Oh they could and they did in Japan when those computers were sold. PC-88 is not IBM PC compatible.
https://necretro.org/PC-88_VA3
Zip disks were much less floppy than floppies. They felt more similar to a single magnetic hard disk platen. Presumably the stiffness was what enabled the head to float above the medium, while also allowing tighter read/write timing because it wasn't subject to such variation. Having a single manufacturer of the disks (at least initially) probably also helped.
IIRC there's some kind of optical tracking going on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floptical
A related technology with a name that already answers your question.
> There's nothing new in this article.
An article about an old and long abandoned technology naturally contains nothing new. What did you expect?
Zip drives were great while they were great. I had one and it was amazing at the time. What was even more amazing, is that Toshiba Libretto in the photo. I wanted one since the first time I saw it, and into the early 2000 as a linux/retro machine and never got one. And even though today that form factor is not that special... Still...
Drives like these and the Syquest drives were essential for desktop publishing well into the early 2000s. I sent many such drives to various printing facilities --- or, sometimes (and, here, I really date myself) separate PostScript bureaus --- to obtain high-res, color-separated film for four-color commercial printing, either by local printers or magazines who would run ads for my employers of the time.
I was just trying to remember the Syquest name. I remembered their products being popular in mac labs (I was a teen at that time).
For a while I badly wanted a zip drive or the (syquest) ez 135 for personal use. But by the time I could afford that stuff I had a scsi board and cd writer… which was clearly the way.
Speaking of backup solutions, why don't we ever see pro-sumer priced tape drives? The technology behind capable LTO drives is now more than 10 years old, shouldn't we see some reductions in price now?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open
> why don't we ever see pro-sumer priced tape drives? The technology behind capable LTO drives is now more than 10 years old, shouldn't we see some reductions in price now
First, LTO drives are conceptually simple, but if you've ever opened one up you'll know they are a feat of horribly complex engineering.
Second, they are not a commodity product. Infact thanks to the magic cloud they are even LESS of a commodity product than they were 10 years ago because lots of people have either wholesale moved to the cloud or use S3 for backup.
1 + 2 = Low volume product with lots of parts crammed into it = high manufacturing cost = high price.
The orgs who still use LTO in their infra are the sort of orgs who don't blink at the price tag. The cost of the CTO's farts is probably more than a 5k tape drive.
> Second, they are not a commodity product.
Are you sure, there's millions of small-to-medium businesses that could use a good and cheap backup solution for terabytes of data.
Back in the era when Zip drives were around, there was a prosumer/SMB tape standard: 1/4-inch QIC. I sold many PCs with a tape drive in one of the drive bays. They were awesome.
They also sucked from a support point of view. People would mistreat the tape. Store them next to giant magnets or on top of the microwave in the restaurant. Forget to run the weekly backup and then blame you when they lost files. I couldn't wait to get them on to CD-RW which showed up for SMBs very soon afterwards in the late 1990s, and then eventually to the cloud. What a relief to no longer need magnetic media.
The irony now is that many of the SMBs I see today (though I no longer consult for them) have effectively zero backup because all their business process is tied up in a SaaS that they do not control. Eg their website is on squarespace, their tasks are on Asana, and their finances are in Quickbooks. Any one of these goes dark, or out of business, or is vandalized and it's curtains for the whole business.
Backup to NAS is a much better solution for a SMB
My experience with tape is very out of date but I doubt much has changed due to the nature of tape
Tape software sucks. Tape restores are cumbersome. A SMB can literally but a multi TB HDD and just drag and drop, and but the drive in a safe.
A SMB will need to hire someone who wants to deal with this niche tape storage, and why would they bother if they can use a NAS for that and a dozen other things at the same time
Tapes can have a shelf life of 30 years. If you need archival storage then tape is a great solution. For everybody else it’s more trouble than it’s worth.
How many of them have actual need for terabytes of storage? And I mean business continuity critical one.
Overall they are much better of buying a few external HDDs. Standard interface, sufficient capacity. Just get trusted person to carry one out every month or three months. For continuous stuff just have NAS.
> millions of small-to-medium businesses that could use a good and cheap backup solution for terabytes of data.
Yes, and that's exactly how small-to-medium business IT used to operate.
These days sadly most small-to-medium businesses are drinking the cloud koolaid.
You would be hard pushed to find a small-biz with a comms room these days, when back in the day every half-decent small-biz office would have a comms room with cab and a few servers in it.
Now most small-biz are on Microsoft or Gmail for mail and their office is full of laptops on WiFi.... nobody has any respect for good old-fashioned structured cabling these days either, sadly. ;(
It is what it is, sadly.
Hence only governments, enterprises and, ironically (if rumours are correct) the cloud providers (for their archival S3 products) are still buying tape.
VHS video cassettes could be used as tape drives!
There was this, from the same era: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArVid
And I have this for my Amiga, also same era: http://www.hugolyppens.com/VBS.html
How reliable did you find VBS?
Unfortunately, I never got around to using it! I bought it with high hopes, but my Zip disks turned out to be so convenient and spacious that the VHS-backup need never arose.
That said, it's not too late... I still have my Amiga system in storage, and a VHS recorder.
>I bought it with high hopes, but my Zip disks turned out to be so convenient and spacious that the VHS-backup need never arose.
It's good to hear, in retrospect, that you were able to use a storage medium that did not even exist when Amiga were discontinued. Which type of interface for the Zip drive works with it?
(It occurs to me that Zip disks presumably offer the great virtue, otherwise absent as I understand it for Amigans, of PC compatibility.)
An Amiga 4000T with a SCSI interface, and the SCSI Zip drive worked perfectly with it – I could even boot the Amiga from a Zip disk!
However, since the Zip disks were formatted with an Amiga file system – I used PFS3 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_File_System) – they couldn't be used with a PC.
I'm curious whether the data is still readable, after 30 years...
When Zip drives hit the market, I already had a SyQuest drive and the Zip drive didn't have much more capacity and its parallel interface was slower than my computer's SCSI interface. I assumed Zip disks would be less reliable than hard disks, as floppy disks had been.
The SyQuest had a real hard drive platter in it so you knew it was robust. The Zip platter was harder than a floppy but softer than a hard drive, so you knew it wasn't as robust.
So I had no incentive to buy into Zip. I saw a few people use them but I assumed they'd never heard of SyQuest and didn't know better. I never had anyone ask for data on a Zip disk or want to give me data on a Zip disk, so I never bothered.
Later when the click-of-death started happening, I figured it would die off and people would switch to SyQuest, but then there was Jaz, which wasn't as popular as Zip, and then CD-ROM took over, which held a lot of data, but was still slow (in spite of IDE) and still not as robust as the SyQuest products.
In 1998, at their end, SyQuest had a 4.7 GB unit, I presume to compete with DVD.
SyQuest and Iomega were both founded in the early '80s and introduced their first removable disk products in 1982, and both introduced cost-reduced consumer-oriented drives in 1995 (EZ135 and Zip, respectively).
IIRC, Iomega captured the consumer market with the Zip drive for mostly business reasons (better marketing, contracts with major retailers and PC OEMs, etc.).
I worked at a university bookstore and we sold lots of disks. while CDs were killing them for long-term storage zips were required for some courses because RW disks suck.
those zip disks were not cheap 10$-15$ each for a paltry 100mb.
the rise of USB sticks really killed them. you could get a 128mb usb stick for similar or cheaper and you didn't need the clunky unreliable zip drive to use them.
Iomega's earlier offering, the Bernoulli Box (I had a few of these), was a solid, dependable removable storage product, though the media was expensive and physically rather large.
The Zip drives that followed were abysmal. We sold a lot of them initially (I was working in a computer store in the early nineties), but sales cratered once the "click of death" became infamous. SyQuest drives suffered from similar reliability issues.
The founder of SyQuest, Syed Iftikhar, later left and set up another company called Castlewood, which introduced yet another removable drive called the Orb. The Orb was genuinely faster and more reliable than anything Iomega or SyQuest had offered.
But with the advent of cheap flash drives and faster broadband internet, transfer and storage of data shifted decisively away from spinning removable media, and the entire category quietly died, taking Castlewood, Iomega, Imation, and SyQuest with it.
I bought one of these. In those days, I could keep the JDK in a box of floppies or it could fit in one Zip. Unfortunately, you had to carry your drive with you, because few people had one. So it only really made sense as backup media for me.
It was probably very localized, where my parent worked in the late 90s every office room had at least one, so my parents also bought one for home so they could easily transfer files.
It almost dissapeares overnight once 32MB+ usb drives became common, much more convenenient.
I remember really wanting one of these but I'm not really sure for what purpose. The idea of a substantial amount of data off a HDD seemed very appealing, and it was around that time where 1.44mb floppies were no longer sufficient but most people didn't have a CD-RW drive yet. Later in the 90s as CD-RW drives replaced CD-ROM drives there wasn't really a need for Zip drives.
So it seems like to me they had an extremely short window to operate without much competition. CD-Rs being about $15 for a spindle and 6.5x the space was an easy pick.
Zip drives were very cool, and even cooler, my folks owned a Powerbook G3 at the time, which allowed hot swapping a Zip drive into the expansion bay (in place of floppy/CD/battery)
Ah, the pismo
I'd offer an alternative take, though it's not completely incompatible with the article: They are an example of the fact that you can buy putting your product on front of lots of people, but you can't buy keeping it there. It has to be good on its own merit to survive. Or at least, it gets more and more expensive to hold it in front of people.
It was, in a lot of ways, too early. I never had one, and I never missed having one. I had other solutions to the problems when they happened. By the time I had the problem, it was not a cost-effective solution.
I know people can pop up and say that it solved some problems for them, but I think the people who it solved problems for, in proportion to the price, weren't enough of a market. By the time they were, CD burners were a much cheaper solution.
If they were 1/4 the price, it might have been a different story... but the price was pretty fundamental to the tech.
You can't buy success. You can buy initial success, but not long term success. By the standards of such products, Zip was relatively successful, because it did have some people it solved a problem for. It was just a minority of their customer base. Enough to hang on for a while, but not to take over the world.
I worked in a university computer lab in the late 90s and these drives were very popular. Burning a CD was not a similar solution.
People needed primary portable storage and Zip drives were amazing solutions before USB drives.
The school gave each student just 15MB of storage for their email account, which was also their homedir storage for any other school project
But the labs had at least a few stations with Zip drives
The article quotes a pretty low failure rate overall but I suspect college students were seeing these fail a lot more because they just threw the disks in their bags and walked around to class all day. Having to deal with someone whose only copy of their work was on one of these triggers a traumatic response in me.
Those were exactly the people I was thinking of when I said it didn't bring enough value. Yes, plenty of students saw a Zip drive bay in their school computers and bought it on the theory that if it was there the schools must know what they were doing and it was a "requirement" of one sort or another. It didn't occur to them that the Zip drives were there because Iomega probably bought their way in, rather than because they were actually a vital tool.
And students may have gotten some minimal, non-zero utility from it, but almost everything they would have been doing at the time would have fit on a floppy disk just fine. Maybe two. The Zip drive was slightly more convenient... for about $150 more. Aroud $300 inflation-adjusted.
That's not $300's worth of value, and especially not $300's worth of value for a college student. I can manage a couple of floppies and "that one time I had a really big project" for $300 as a college student.
Yes, I'm sure you have a story of that one guy who had an 80MB project that fit no other way. But think of all the people who had 96% empty drives because all their documents were tiny that don't come to mind.
You will note that there was no cohort of people coming out of college demanding Zip drives everywhere else in the world after them, because I doubt very many of your students came away with a strongly positive impression of the Zip drive, even for those for whom it worked perfectly.
Zip drives arrived at exactly the same time as digital art, the web, and most importantly Macromedia Flash. Maybe the CS people with a few source code files didn’t fully use the space, but the art kids certainly did.
There simply was no other option at the time than Zip drives. Others did not strike the right balance of price, capacity, responsiveness, etc. Maybe Iomega paid to get them installed, I don’t know, but there really was no other option so I can easily see schools buying them just because they needed a solution.
USB thumb drives started appearing not long after, and they didn’t suffer from the click of death, so those became the preferred media by the time those people graduated school.
There is no question that Zip Drives succeeded by dominating the shelves of every computer store I ever shopped at. They had a massive share of that all-important real-estate.
This was a market where people were building PCs from no-name components in plain wrapping. Most everything I ordered was out of the back of a trade rag with classified ads that were nothing but tight listings of part numbers and prices. Zip Drive was akin to SoundBlaster in its uniquely flashy, colorful packaging, branded hardware offering.
I eschewed them for a while, and when SyQuest came out with a PC-compatible (and SCSI-compatible) competitor, I picked that up instead. Why? Because SyQuest had imprinted their brand on me when I saw every serious Apple user with a SyQuest on their desk or in their pocket. I knew that this was a tacit testimony of reliability. SyQuest had the necessary experience and R&D already in place to provide quality and reliability, where Zip had none of that reputation.
My SyQuest never failed or clicked, although it became obsolete at the same rate as the Zips. I never regretted not having a Zip drive, for sure!
Physical media is the answer to content overload: it has a thingness that the ephemera of online digital content does not. Its physical nature allows for artistic expression on and in the thing. The act of insertion and removal provides a psychological gate between "starting", "doing" and "finishing".
It is the opposite of The Eternal Scroll. It is the hero we need.
I was there in the mid- to late nineties writing computer books and doing the typesetting myself on QuarkXPress (in the prehistoric era before InDesign existed), back in an era where you'd enter a bookshop and 95%+ of the book and magazines were typeset on QuarkXPress on a Mac.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuarkXPress
And we'd all have Zip drives and even internal Zip drives reader/writer in our G3. Can be seen on the picture here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Macintosh_G3
They were big indeed and I'd say huge in the publishing industry. Then the CD writers and then DVD writers began to rule to earth.
I'm sure this is the second time I even read about them.
I don't even think I've seen a single on here in Russia in the 90s.
5.25 in my fathers company? Sure. 3.5 everywhere else? Da. CDs at some point.
Hell, even minidisc was there (also almost non-existent, I think I know only two people who actually owned a minidisc player).
No sing of Zip.
ZIP drives were too expensive for freshly post-Communist Czechia. A FDD would cost about USD 40-50, much more affordable than the ZIP drive with its 200 USD price tag. And the media were much cheaper, especially if you bought no-name diskettes for, say, USD 2-3. This way, you could discard a bad medium without feeling the economic pinch too much. Discarding a 20 USD ZIP medium would be quite painful.
I think I only saw two computers with ZIP drives in the wild, so to say. Which created its own anti-network effects: if there is no expectation of the other party having a compatible drive, you will either have to do with floppies, or maybe carry an external HDD with you, but you won't use an exotic and expensive format. Pretty much the only plausible use was backup.
I still believe that with a more aggressive price policy, ZIPs could have conquered a lot of territory in the 1990s. But 200/20 USD was just too much money to spend. Not just in the post-Soviet bloc, but almost everywhere in Asia, too. Big markets lost because of the cost, and therefore a chance to entrench the standard worldwide.
> I don't even think I've seen a single on here in Russia in the 90s.
I'm not surprised, considering they were expensive. That doesn't mean they weren't popular in the west.
CDs where not cheap either, mind you. Yet CDs replaced cassettes rather quickly.
They were like a 3-4 year fad while also CD burners were coming online so they did not really provide a significant storage medium because if you wanted large sizes, you typically just needed readonly CDs.
Needing large and Read-Write was the niche than CD-R and CD-RW did much better. Along with CDs in general, they just didn't do much more than span a small temporal gap in value proposition.
T
In my country PCs did not catch on until the second part of the 90s. Before then computers were found in offices and labs.
Hell the first commercial ISP in the Netherlands only started in 1995.
By the time the digital age arrived for the general population CD ROM and DSL were a thing.
It is easy to forget that for decades computers were basically a sub culture thing that did not touch mainstream society.
I used a Zip drive with an Akai MPC 2000 over SCSI to store all my songs and sounds. Loved it! Never had a problem with it, and I didn't exactly look after it well. The MPC itself still had the builtin floppy drive, and the zip just blew the floppy away in speed and capacity.
That me reminds me of installing a SCSI Zip drive into my roommate's Akai S5000 or S6000 sampler. He and I repeatedly debated whether or not hardware samplers would eventually lose out to software solutions. He was absolutely convinced that there was no way in hell that the precision of hardware solutions would ever lose out to the flexibility of software. In the end, I was right, I'm pretty sure the S5000 and S6000 were some of the last truly hardware samplers of the era. Still, that Akai was a sexy bit of kit back then. As sure as I was that software would eventually win out it was sad to see the amazing engineering and precision of the hardware that was finally overtaken.
They filled the gap when CD-R/CD-RW was crazy expensive and people needed more storage space. The cd-r/rw drives drives dropping in price killed it. I believe they later had a 200 or 250 mb drive, the Jaz. I think places that needed big storage used tapes.
There was also the issue that one would also need a reader. Why would I buy a zip reader if no one else has one (network effect)? (Btw I never saw in my life a zip reader or a zip disk.)
Whereas with USB sticks all one needed was a USB port. I immediately wanted a stick.
Partially this was solved by the ZipDrive being designed for portability as well (I'm not even sure if there was ever a built in model). So if you needed to copy a large file and take it to a friends house you just took the drive with you.
Most of us were using Zip drives to backup our files and then put the disks on shelf. There was no cloud backup, and 100MB was often enough for all your personal files.
It was also used by professional who needed to transfer large (for the times) amounts of data but not so much or without the technical background that high density tapes or routinely swapping hard drives was sensible (or possible): images, document scans, …
this. IIRC the internal drive plus two disks being significantly cheaper than an external hard drive of similar capacity
Before the first iMac arrived with only USB ports and thereby forced peripheral makers to support USB, USB just wasn't all that common even in the Windows world: why would a 1997 manufacturer bother with USB when all the machines already had all the other ports we here in 2026 find subsumed into USB?
But only a few years later, as you say, USB thumb drives were making Zip drives irrelevant.
USB was slooooooow in comparison to SCSI or later FireWire, though, so that took a hardware generations to really catch on.
I think the network effect was more a question of who had tons of data: for example, all of the graphic design shops had Zip or Jazz drives because they needed to schlep client deliverables around so you could just assume they had the hardware. Most people weren’t generating that much data before digital cameras became common.
Was it really the iMac that did it? I don't think I remember anyone saying that until recent years. Around the time of the first iMac, just about every home PC already had a pair of USB 1.1 ports because of Windows 98 and a lot more plug and play support.
What I recall being sold for Mac were FireWire peripherals back in the late 90s and most of the 2000s. By 2000, USB 2.0 was too good to ignore and addressed all the pain points manufacturers had with USB 1.1 being too slow. That's when I remember USB drives finally being practical and mainstream.
IIRC, the Mac magazines I read at the time were making this claim.
The magazines may have been wrong and their claims turned into an urban legend in the meantime, but it's part of the general sense of what I recall from, ugh, nearly 30 years back now.
The iMac certainly accelerated the adoption curve. There were USB ports on other PCs, but since they also had normal (at the time) ports, no PC users were going out and buying all-new USB peripherals.
Apple's decision to leave out all the other ports meant that a bunch of folks were forced to buy new USB peripherals (and/or adapters), and gave peripheral manufacturers a dedicated market for USB
I don't but this. The first 2 generations of iPod didn't even have USB connectors, only FireWire, which was a PITA as most PCs had a USB connection by that time but FireWire wasn't common as opposed to Mac.
I don't think that runs contrary to my point in any way?
By the time the iPod came around, Apple had adopted FireWire to handle devices that USB's then-limited bandwidth couldn't really support. USB peripherals like mouse/keyboards were already pretty widespread by then.
Apple is consistently weird about peripherals, yes.
Hockey Puck mouse.
I'm not really convinced.
It seems that even Apple quickly caved in and put FireWire on the G3 iMac when they updated the design to a slot loader in 1999.
I don't have anything against Apple, but USB before the 2000s was pretty bad. It seems weird that people are now thinking otherwise.
Sure. The point I was claiming was not Apple being first nor early USB being good, though I don't speak for swiftcoder.
When Firewire was introduced, it wasn't ever popular enough to get the self-sustaining popularity loop of "all the machines have it" <-> "all the peripheral makers support it".
Apple made that happen for USB. Not because USB was amazing in 1997, but because it was the only thing on what was then the cheapest new Mac.
> Apple made that happen for USB
Yup I do think that's true for Mac users, and questioning Apple fans' just-so stories are usually worthwhile to anyone curious. They sure do keep history alive and well. I mean, hey, The Beatles made an entire career out of doing that with their fans!
I just realized this month was Apple's 50th anniversary, so that's likely part of why this is making the rounds. I guess I have my answer.
Probably also worth noting the list of founding members of the USB-IF did not include Apple (not surprising). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_Implementers_Forum
The motivations behind the "legacy-free PC" has its own Wikipedia page too which is pretty neat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy-free_PC
> but USB before the 2000s was pretty bad
Indeed. So bad that no one apart from Apple would have tried to go all-in on it. I doubt things like USB mice and keyboards would ever have happened if Apple didn't give it a kick in the behind
Firewire was indeed a nice addition when that came along, but it always remained the domain of pricey high-bandwidth devices.
I did some more digging to find out that the infamous BSOD demo with Bill Gates on stage was meant to show off plug and play on Windows 98. It was caused by a USB scanner.
This happened 4 months before the release date of the first iMac.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=IW7Rqwwth84
Yeah, I mean, I don't disagree with any of this, I just don't think any vendor in the PC world was prepared to rip the PS/2 and serial ports off their motherboards, and tell all the peripheral manufacturers to go take a hike
Zip drives were revolutionary for 100mb and then 250mb storage, at the same time that many people gained widespread access to the Internet. But they were proprietary and required you to have an external drive available to write or read from them (and that might also mean a SCSI port).
So when affordable CD-R became available, even though early drives were slow writers, they had the advantage that they could be read from practically any computer. With ubiquitous non-proprietary CD-ROM drives and the huge 700mb capacity, Zip drives were tossed as soon as someone bought a CD-R drive.
At the height of first phase of using Macs between 1992 and 1998 having an Mac LCII and later a PowerMac 6100/60, I had a 5 device SCSI chain including a Zip Drive and later a Jaz drive (1GB removable drive) along with two hard drives and CDROM drive.
I remember that the biggest problems with Zip drives was that most Windows PCs didn’t come with SCSI and that they had some Frankenstein parallel port version.
For context when I bought my Zip drive, my internal hard drive was only 80MB and part of that was used as an emulated hard drive for my Apple //e card.
I loved my zip drive it was loud but I loved that it had my stuff on it and there was no need to compromise on what I would keep or trash, which itself was part of the attachment to this new thing
hello,
zip-drives where great - at least compared to what other possibilities where around these days:
overall, zip-drives where not that expensive, especially the medias.
but they died every now& then ...
so it was more or less only a possibility to transfer data, not so much to archive it! this was what cd-r and later dvd-r where there for :)
imho. the "real" problem where often the drives themselfs, they where available with various interfaces, the most common was (!) parallel / "printer-port" / centronics (!) .. veeery slow.
the "best" ones had scsi =?> fast etc. but you needed an scsi-controller with an external connector for that
if i remember it correctly, there where even IDE/PATA-drives available - but i think only internal ones - and later usb-variants (also slow) ...
btw. what where the alternative in the late 1990ties!?
* syquests
great drives, especially the 5.25 inch variants, but they where already "dated" by then. and the 3.5 inch variants where pretty expensive and had reliability-issues ...
additionally: lots of people mistook the 3,5 inch variants for floppy-disk-drives and ruined early models by inserting floppies into them =?> the later got some mechanical protection against that!
* (old) harddisks
my "medium of choice" where old hdds, which i plugged into the machines between which i wanted to transfer data ...
by far the "best" option, but also the most "technical" one ;)
just my 0.02€
Magneto-optical drives are what I miss! The nearest thing we ever had to a durable and useable long-term storage media for normal users, as far as I know.
While I owned and used several Zip drives back in the day, the first thing that came to mind when I saw this post was the final scene of Zoolander, where a Zip disk backup of incriminating files saves the day.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cALVig8bw9w&t=177s
Interesting that in that time all kind of external storage solutions emerged: I used Zip drives, the follow-up "Jaz drive" (1GB) and Syquest disks (270 MB?). The latter two chained together with thick SCSI cables to a PowerMac 7200.
Edit: Today I use just 2.5" SSDs in the same way. There's a small sata to usb-c adapter where I plug them in without any further enclosure.
Jaz was really where the technology excelled, but it also had its own problems, and after dealing with zip failures, iomega was basically dead.
100 MB of portable storage in 95 - 1999 was a huge deal. Hard drives were pretty standard to build into DIY PCs at about 140 - 320 MB.
Indeed, it was about reliability in the end for Iomega. LGR Covered it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pBhEaMp8mw
We had a SCSI zip-drive at our uni and it was a brilliant way to drag megabytes of content home. Even though I had amazing internet (2Mbit shared by 100+ ppl), the zip drive would still be a good way of getting stuff home.
Then I got to experience the click of death and the internet connection was bumped to 100Mbit and I didn't need to replace my zip drive.
They were the best way to pirate software from work, like Photoshop and illustrator.
I also learned a 90's bubble investment tip on TV that if you went to the companies office and night and all the lights were on they were cooking and worth investing in. And the TV investor said he visited Iomega and they were cooking.
Dominated is strong. I can only speak for myself but it felt like only maybe 5% of computer owners I knew had it.
The end came quickly.
https://www.deseret.com/1999/8/20/19461583/iomega-president-...
TL ; DR
Floppy disks were tiny and slow
Zip drives in 1995 were around $200 and 100MB disk for about $20
CD-R burners in 1995 were $1000 and blank CD-R were about $15 each
By 1999 CD-R burners were around $125 and blank discs were around $1 and dropping fast. I remember when they were $0.10 for a 700MB disc in the 2000s
That was exactly the experience I had - there was a very narrow window where ZIP drives were the best option, but once you had some they hung around into the early 2000s.
I knew a bunch of Mac graphic design people that used Zip disks into the 2000's because they had to transfer huge files and the Zip discs were rewritable unlike CD-R. Rewriting a CD-RW is clunky compared to a Zip disk.
I actually bought one of these Panasonic PD Phase-change Dual drives in 1995. It was $500 and the cartridges were $30 for 650MB. I formatted them as ext2 and used the standard cp / mv / rm commands. This technology later evolved into the DVD-RAM standard. DVD-RW and DVD+RW were very different.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-change_Dual
Zip disks continued in their niche until USB sticks were large enough and reliable enough - because of that ability to use them as a disk - there were some packages that claimed to turn a CD-RW (or even a CD-R using append) into something that pretended to be editable, but they weren't great.
Macs did much better with removable drives for years since the users were used to "ejecting" the disk instead of just pulling it out.
Back around 1999 I tested some patches from Linux kernel hacker Jens Axboe that added packet writing support. This enabled DVD+RW discs to look like normal drives and you didn't have to make an ISO image and burn it.
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v6.1/cdrom/packet-writing.ht...
https://reactivated.net/software/packetwriting/
And in my googling for those links I find that Jens is still the block device maintainer and submitted a patch in 2025 to remove support for packet writing.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-To-Remove-pktcdvd
> "This driver has long outlived it's utility, and it's broken and unloved. The main use case for this was direct mount with UDF of cd-rw drives that required 32kb packets. It would collect writes into that size and write them out in multiples of that. That's not a common use case anymore, the world has moved on from those kinds of media. To make matters worse, it's actively breaking setups where it's not even required or useful."
There was a pretty short window where it was more useful than just dedicating 700mb of cache on the hard drive, about the time that CDs could easily be larger than your hard drive.
I still have the original one with parallel port connector and a couple of Zip disks.
Nowadays probably would need an USB converter, assuming everything still works.
"The problem was estimated by Iomega to affect around 0.5% of Zip drives,..."
I guess I was just majorly unlucky. clickclickclickclick*...
I remember back in the late 90s we had a war between the ZIP and JAZ drive advocates, but I can't remember what the virtues of each were.
I remember using one only once, while working on computerising the school library. (I did that as a summer job, between school years.)
We got a number of these to replace our Iomega Bernoulli Boxes. We skipped the Jaz and went to CDs.
> Why Zip drives dominated the 90s, then vanished almost overnight
This is such an odd take to me.
I sold and supported computers in the 1990s. Outside of a few industries, such as desktop publishing, Zip was not popular. The vast majority of computer owners never owned a Zip drive, unlike a floppy or soon to be CDROM.
In fact, I sold far more QIC-80 tape drives for backups than Zip drives.
Zip also didn't vanish overnight, it simple never caught on with most people. However, in the industries that used them, they hung on for a while.
There were some niche use cases too.
For awhile, the Ontario Health Insurance Program allowed physicians to submit their billing in person via zip drive. I remember depositing the disks for my parents (funny the things one remembers)
This was the time between paper billing and digital submissions.
The other "has been" technology of the era was the "LS-120 SuperDisk". It was backwards compatible with standard 1.44MB 3.5" disks but you could buy special disks with 120MB capacity, and you didn't need to take up two slots on your front bays for both floppy and zip (and could write back to standard 1.44MB disks when taking some files to campus or sharing with "normal" computers). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperDisk
...in retrospect as the article states: swept away by CD-rw and USB sticks, but a great technology! There really was a critical gap in "I need to back up _all_ my files or coursework for the semester" or "Wouldn't it be great to be able to fit TEN games on a floppy instead of ONE game on ten floppies?"
It really was a different era!
they never dominated the 90s, someone is trying hard to rewrite history, when someone was sharing something with me they used either 3.5" floppies or CDR, never in my life I held in hands zip drives, neither did anyone I know
up until mid 90s it was floppies, then since mid 90s it was CDR
it's like saying minidiscs dominated the 90s, which would be as stupid