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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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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