The community college near me had zip drives on the library computers. I bought one primarily so I could download Netscape there and bring it home because doing it that way was faster than using our dialup connection.
It could’ve been a great computer storage medium, but it took far too long to be sold as such. By the time minidisc was being marketed as floppy/zip replacement, cd-Rs were a thing.
But minidiscs were so much cooler. They came in neon colours and you felt like a super hacker man when you clunked them into a player and used them for storing data rather than music.
I once spent weeks trying to get a scanner, a printer and a zip drive to work on a single parallel port. Needless to say, it was a fool's errand. I ended up buying an ISA card with two extra parallel ports which after fiddling endlessly with interrupts kind of worked. Ah, the good old days. Now get off my lawn, damn kids!
I’m pretty sure my uncle started that haha. He had a Zip drive and just couldn’t let the name go when we moved everything over to usb sticks.
For real though, he’s the only person I know who calls usb sticks “Zip drives”. It’s funny to think it carried over with other folks because not many people had those things to start with.
Somewhere out there is a Zip disk full of porn I collected as a teenager.
Used to see Iomega stuff advertised in PC magazines back in the day. Always wanted them but was impossible for me as a child to acquire that kind of hardware
They were a nice alternative to the Syquest and Bernoulli disks we were using at the time--inasmuch as they were cheaper and I didn't need to worry if the person I was going to send a file to had a 44, 88, 135 or 270 MB SyQuest: almost everyone had a Zip drive.
...but the click-of-death hurt them, and the ubiquity of CDRs and USB thumb drives was the real end.
I think I used one of these things to just do a full directory copy of Civ2 and a few other games that were somehow installed on one computer in one classroom and bring them to my eMachine at home.
Fuck yes I do. I was really fortunate in that I never got the click of death, and so a straight hundo at the time was future tech now. I was using tech no one else around me understood, so it was rad as fuck for me. I miss my Zip disks.
I remember the tv ad that ran for them. It was a like a Mission Impossible style data heist and a dude zipped his files to the drive and jumped out the plane before it could be hijacked or some such.
I just went through my family's old zip drives and floppy disks from the basement out of curiosity. I had to borrow a friend's old "you never know when you'll need this again" zip drive and tower to get a parallel port again. Haven't found anything really interesting yet. DOS games and old taxes, mostly. Only one disk made the click of death, but I was able to read most of it still.
I wish I could find my old zip disks and drive at my mom's house. It has my old middle-school AngelFire website files from a site I ran called DBZPlanet. Was mostly me learning Photoshop to cut DBZ characters out of their backgrounds and adding glow to them. Along with basic news about when Cartoon Network would be airing the next set of English translation episodes. My first website.
Friend won a Zip drive at a computer conference and then we won a Jazz drive at the next one. He used iOmega stickers to write "Zip it" on his shirt. We used iOmega buttons to write "i Ω" across our shirts.
I never used them but I did have the zip-branded external CD-RW drive that came way later. I just looked it up and apparently it was notoriously crap but I never had an issue with it.
I have several working that I still use with vintage computers. Retro Macs can boot from the scsi version and it's way faster then the PC parallel port version <3
That was how me and my friends would get around the Foolproof software on the macs in high school.
Put a bootable os 9 system folder on a zip drive, boot from it, open the Foolproof control panel in resedit, delete all the resources, reboot into regular os 9, open quake3arena, profit.
You have to be a) old enough to have been working with very expensive machines in the late 80s and early 90s, but b) not so old that you're a complete luddite.
I was in newspaper publishing, so yeah, I went through a 44, 88 and EZ135 drives. Zip 100s might not have been as quick, but they were a lot cheaper and they seemed more ubiquitous, where Syquest was kind of a crapshoot.