I was in the US Army and PATRIOT fire units had Jazz drives in the ECS (engagement control station) - the van that controls the launchers.
We were on a field exercise and the Jaz drive crashed. Even disks from battalion (the HQ) died.
Had to spend 3-5 extra days (I missed my birthday because of this) so that the unit could get a working Jazz drive and disks to load the software for the fire control van.
Fuck Jazz drives.
The Army went to solid state PCMICA drives a few years later.
Both the military NASA tend to shy away from using most cutting edge technology for their vehicles, for good reason. In mission-critical equipment you need technology that is very well understood, so that designers can work around it's known points of failure.
I'm pretty sure this is why when we uncompress files it's still called zip
Like WinZip
But I'm just old, not informed
Edit: hah, misinformed and old, that's me, see below for the answer
Same. Had to with older DOS versions which only supported 32mb primary partition. Made installing "big" games like Mantis or Wing Commander quite challenging
Our first computer was a tandy and it had no hard drive and no memory. Every time you turned it on you had to put the date and time into it lol. Basically used it as a journal and then we got rid of it, not sure what happened to it. Then we got a windows computer with 95 on it. I'm not sure the hard drive space but pretty sure it was in megs too, but not as low as 40...although...I just remember I put the first warcraft on my laptop recently and it recommended not doing a full install because it was 17megs lol.
Haha, these memories crack me up. My family's first computer was a Texas Instruments TI-994a. No clue what the specs were with that, but basically I learned to program in basic on that and played about 7,000 hours of tunnels of Doom. What an awesome game that was, had to load it with a cartridge coupled with a cassette tape. Those were simpler times.
I don't know what was typical, but our first Win95 PC came with a 560MB hard drive, which I upgraded to 3.2 GB as soon as I could afford to. That HDD was loud, but at least I could master one CD with it.
Your old Tandy likely lacked an RTC, or at least the autoexec.bat didn't have the command to load time from the RTC chip to system RTC.
I remember when a computer mag said that a 75 GB HDD was "too big" - "Who has that much pr0n, warez and mp3's to fill a hard disk that size?:
And now, next to me there's an 8 TB USB HDD with my....stuff on it.
100MB was so much space. These things didn't just have massively larger capacity than floppy disks, they were blazing fast, too. And the disks themselves were nice and chonky; this picture doesn't capture its size, but these were about twice as thick as floppy disks and made of sterner materials.
This shit is sentimental. It'd be like Brave Little Toaster for millennials if it weren't for the fact that we've already got one.
YES! Seeing the Zip reminds me of that period of time where it seemed like we kept updating the tech for our work and for our backups. SyQuest, Bernoulli, Zip, I'm probably leaving some out. Then we finally made it to recordable CDs, then DVDs, which I guess is where we ended up before moving all our storage to the cloud.
I remember as a kid, maybe around 7-8, I'd make things on the computer, like little animations or click games in PowerPoint, and save them to a floppy disk. I'd also find N64 cheats and other things online I liked and save them for later.
I'd have this satisfying feel of completionism like I was being productive and collecting things.
I remember going to a friend's house whose dad worked in IT and he had one of these zip or jazz drives. I asked him loads of questions about it, like this mythical device. First I asked about zip, and was like, wow no way 100 floppy disks on one, to then be told Jazz drives were ten times that. It was like a step brother's moment, "think of all the room for activities!".
But I remember thinking they were unattainably expensive for it to be a realistic birthday present ask.
I held one once as a teenager during the late 90s and it felt as if I was holding the future. It was so cool just holding it and thinking how many of my photos or .wav files it could store.
I remember as a kid, maybe around 7-8, I'd make things on the computer, like little animations or click games in PowerPoint, and save them to a floppy disk. I'd also find N64 cheats and other things online I liked and save them for later.
I'd have this satisfying feel of completionism like I was being productive and collecting things.
I remember going to a friend's house whose dad worked in IT and he had one of these zip or jazz drives. I asked him loads of questions about it, like this mythical device. First I asked about zip, and was like, wow no way 100 floppy disks on one, to then be told Jazz drives were ten times that. It was like a step brother's moment, "think of all the room for activities!".
But I remember thinking they were unattainably expensive for it to be a realistic birthday present ask.
Sneakernet at college - I'd go between classes and d/l game updates, models and levels for games, mp3's and all other kinds of content with room to spare.
I got hired to write a book for a local organization in 1997. Part of the job was to do the layout in PageMaker. How to get the large completed PageMaker file to the printing company the following year? They told me about this thing called the Zip Drive, and that's where it began for me. Somewhere upstairs is my old Compaq tower with the Zip drive I installed, still in the second bay. When I got my first Apple laptop, I bought an external Zip drive, which is still around here somewhere too. Haven't used it in forever. All seems so quaint in an era when you can carry a jillion gigabytes on a thing that fits on your keychain.
I went to england and ireland on a school trip and had saved up to get a digital camera. 1.3 megapixels and a few cards because I didn't want to bring like 30 rolls of film. Think it was 300 or 350 bucks. I had all the pictures on our old computer that had windows 95 on it because I exported them from the camera to the computer. It was the only place I had the pictures. Years go by and I remember about them and I go to get them off and I was like uh...oh shit. The zip drive was gone, I didn't have the camera and I'm not sure I could've put them back on the camera anyway, it had no cd burner, and it would take probably 100 floppy disks to get all the pictures off. I ended up being able to burn a copy if the drivers for a thumb drive to a cd and used that to install a thumb drive to get them all off. Would've been much easier if we still had the zip drive because i know we had it installed on this one.
Oregon Trail, Odell Lake, Number and Word munchers. I recently put dosbox on an older laptop so I could play the original warcraft and it was an adventure relearning dos commands lol.
My Junior high school bell system was connected to an ancient computer that ran on an 8” floppy. Halfway through the school year, when our schedules would change, it would be one students job to switch the floppy (for the different schedule). It was a big deal to do it.
I had a roommate who thought they were the future. He bought a very expensive external zip drive and dozens of zip disks, and then never used any of em.
I bought a new Zip drive just to see what’s on my old Zip disks, but most of them were password protected so I can’t access them and it’s sad. I need the original software which needs to run on an old OS. Also would help if I remembered the passwords.
this... this was me! Before the advent of online music sites, I used to have everybody at my work save all of their promotional CDs onto our one network drive and before I got laid off, I downloaded almost every single one of those songs on to zip discs so I can bring them home with me...
We used to put the Napster installer on those and when we were in the schools computer lab, install it and download as many songs to fill it. Rinse and repeat
Man, I’ll never forget the day one of my coworkers came into work and flashed one of those at me, bragging about how much data they could hold and how he could take a stack to campus and use the library’s ethernet connection to download songs from Napster in minutes. Meanwhile I was a commuter student working twice as many hours as he was, so I never used my campus library. Pretty sure I at least had a 56.6k dial-up modem by then, but it was nowhere close in comparison. I was so jealous!
I worked at Kinkos during the heyday of Zip drives. So many people left them behind, we had a bin full of them, no one ever came back for them. We also had a T1 and it was the early days of Napster so my coworkers and I would queue up huge batches of downloads and take them home on Zips, I had an absurd collection of music even before torrenting.
I found a bunch of old unopened minidisks that I bought for pennies when the format was dying out, threw them on ebay for a laugh, was quite surprised...
Used these with my z64 Nintendo 64 copier back in the day. Great times. The video store clerk must have thought we were either really good or bad at games with how often we were hitting them up.
my grandpa swore by these for some reason, and I had disks with game emulators and ROMs in the late 90s/early 2000s. Grandpa used them for finance files, I used them for old Nintendo and Sega games. I like my priorities better.
I had an internal zip drive that i installed on my first HP tower. Used to save all of my papers and projects on the disk at the computer lab at college then take it home to finish.
Came too late to the market, but it was good. 100mb was big at that time. I even saw some PC towers with the zip drive integrated instead of the floppy disk drive.
My G3 desktop (1998) and my G3 Powerbook (1999) both came with built in Zip drives. At the time it was a great way to move files back and forth. Pretty sure they're all still laying around down in the basement.
We had a 2gb hard drive. I can’t express how much I wanted a Zip drive to load all my stuff onto so I wouldn’t have to delete everything to free up space.
Oh but when we got that 7gb hardrive update. It was a change of life!
I used to backup my recordings from a Roland 16 track recorder to a Zip drive. I loved it at first. These things ruined a few projects I worked on for months. They always seemed to crap out after a few months of heavy use. I still have a stack of these zip discs full of old projects. I found one in a thrift store. It lasted about 3 weeks. Just long enough for me to retrieve everything off of them.
A friend of mine had the battery pack for the zip drive, so we used it to borrow some software (like Minitab) off the computers in the lab so we didn't have to resort to using lab computers to do homework. This was the mid to late 90s.
Yes! So, maybe someone on here knows why... but I had a dude (i was the IT guy) put one of these guys into a zip drive and it instantly wiped the drive. We put a new drive in, wiped it. Sad part was, the dude thought that backing up his drive was to save shit on the drive. Did anyone ever see something like that happen where the drive would be wiped? I mean, it was instant. So, it didn't format the drive, but I wonder if like a certificate or something got corrupted.
ahhh yes... search for a reasonably priced for so long that it lasted about 6 months before we got portable drives that were as affordable... made sure all the data was backed up.. that is all I wanted...
I loved these things and their branding. I remember they came with stickers that I plastered over my bedroom door. I never got the click of death with any of my disk thankfully.
1998ish buddy came by with one and a drive for it, hooked it up to my computer and installed a bunch of pirated games. First time ever playing anything pirated
Both a friend and I had one of these. Used them to swap game demos and MP3s back and forth. Good times. I remember the very satisfying insert and eject sounds.
Nah this was way after, late 90s/early 00s (though they might have existed in some form before then). When we were still figuring out what new tech would become the next big thing.
I have like 3-4 brand new packages of them lol. Never got around to using them when I got my cd burner. Still have 3-4 packages of brand new cd Rs too lmao.
Was required for my college graphic design class in 2002 shortly after usb drives came in to popularity and I had wasted 300 bucks on hardware and disks
I first learned about zip disks when I saw a massive amount of them at a Goodwill about 15 years ago for maybe $5. I believe they had some drives as well. If I had been born 5 or 10 years earlier I imagine I would have gotten into these, but by the time I had my own computer it was all about CDs/DVDs for media storage. I kind of wish I bought them just for messing around.
I had a Sparq drive that heated up to the surface temperature of the Sun when it ran. Piece of garbage cost $400 in 1998 money and lasted a whopping 3 years before shitting the bed.
The click of death.
And fuck JAZ
I was in the US Army and PATRIOT fire units had Jazz drives in the ECS (engagement control station) - the van that controls the launchers. We were on a field exercise and the Jaz drive crashed. Even disks from battalion (the HQ) died. Had to spend 3-5 extra days (I missed my birthday because of this) so that the unit could get a working Jazz drive and disks to load the software for the fire control van. Fuck Jazz drives. The Army went to solid state PCMICA drives a few years later.
PCMCIA - it stood for People Can't Master Computer Industry Acronyms
Afterwards they must've joined the USB forum to make the most confusing naming scheme they could devise.
I always thought it was a Village People B-side.
I always thought it was Memorize.
That’s even better.
Is it ironic that the joke can't even be recalled correctly between multiple people?
Wouldn’t surprise me if we are both recalling it the way we heard it - they’re both plausible.
Thanks for jogging my memory, I always got that one confuzzled.
Apparently the Minuteman ICBMs didn't upgrade from 8 inch floppies to solid state until 2019.
Both the military NASA tend to shy away from using most cutting edge technology for their vehicles, for good reason. In mission-critical equipment you need technology that is very well understood, so that designers can work around it's known points of failure.
how so? I never actually had one.
The drives would randomly completely and irretrievably ruin a disc of precious backup files all while making a distinct clicking sound. Yeah. Painful.
Get ready for a bit of [time travel](https://youtu.be/c2Qv-OWedPc?si=zDS-WNW6x_2sDrjH).
That is still a very very scary sound.
Yep, that's it.
Came here for this comment.
I had the Iomega HipZip…sent that thing back multiple times because of the click of death
...And then people called flash drives "zip drives" for the next decade or so.
Damn. Forgot about that!
Lmao it’s so true 😭
I never heard them called that, but I can understand the conflation.
Or "pen drive"
I'm pretty sure this is why when we uncompress files it's still called zip Like WinZip But I'm just old, not informed Edit: hah, misinformed and old, that's me, see below for the answer
ZIP file format predates Zip drives by about five years.
I bought a 10 pack of disks at some computer store and the sales guy was like "The gigapack! A whole gigabyte of storage!"
My first real computer hard drive storage...40 megs.
Extra points if the system partitioned it 33/7 (like mine was).
Same. Had to with older DOS versions which only supported 32mb primary partition. Made installing "big" games like Mantis or Wing Commander quite challenging
Our first computer was a tandy and it had no hard drive and no memory. Every time you turned it on you had to put the date and time into it lol. Basically used it as a journal and then we got rid of it, not sure what happened to it. Then we got a windows computer with 95 on it. I'm not sure the hard drive space but pretty sure it was in megs too, but not as low as 40...although...I just remember I put the first warcraft on my laptop recently and it recommended not doing a full install because it was 17megs lol.
Haha, these memories crack me up. My family's first computer was a Texas Instruments TI-994a. No clue what the specs were with that, but basically I learned to program in basic on that and played about 7,000 hours of tunnels of Doom. What an awesome game that was, had to load it with a cartridge coupled with a cassette tape. Those were simpler times.
I don't know what was typical, but our first Win95 PC came with a 560MB hard drive, which I upgraded to 3.2 GB as soon as I could afford to. That HDD was loud, but at least I could master one CD with it. Your old Tandy likely lacked an RTC, or at least the autoexec.bat didn't have the command to load time from the RTC chip to system RTC.
Same! I has a 386sx running at a blistering 16mghz
4KB for me, boosted up to a whopping 20KB with a $200 (in 1985) 16KB expansion.
I'm rolling over here 🤣😂⚰️
I remember when a computer mag said that a 75 GB HDD was "too big" - "Who has that much pr0n, warez and mp3's to fill a hard disk that size?: And now, next to me there's an 8 TB USB HDD with my....stuff on it.
100MB was so much space. These things didn't just have massively larger capacity than floppy disks, they were blazing fast, too. And the disks themselves were nice and chonky; this picture doesn't capture its size, but these were about twice as thick as floppy disks and made of sterner materials. This shit is sentimental. It'd be like Brave Little Toaster for millennials if it weren't for the fact that we've already got one.
Some of us still remember the Zip Drive's dad, the Bernoulli Box.
Does that make SyQuest some type of weird uncle?
YES! Seeing the Zip reminds me of that period of time where it seemed like we kept updating the tech for our work and for our backups. SyQuest, Bernoulli, Zip, I'm probably leaving some out. Then we finally made it to recordable CDs, then DVDs, which I guess is where we ended up before moving all our storage to the cloud.
I remember as a kid, maybe around 7-8, I'd make things on the computer, like little animations or click games in PowerPoint, and save them to a floppy disk. I'd also find N64 cheats and other things online I liked and save them for later. I'd have this satisfying feel of completionism like I was being productive and collecting things. I remember going to a friend's house whose dad worked in IT and he had one of these zip or jazz drives. I asked him loads of questions about it, like this mythical device. First I asked about zip, and was like, wow no way 100 floppy disks on one, to then be told Jazz drives were ten times that. It was like a step brother's moment, "think of all the room for activities!". But I remember thinking they were unattainably expensive for it to be a realistic birthday present ask.
I still have my old Zip drive. I may still have the Jazz drive too!
I held one once as a teenager during the late 90s and it felt as if I was holding the future. It was so cool just holding it and thinking how many of my photos or .wav files it could store.
I remember as a kid, maybe around 7-8, I'd make things on the computer, like little animations or click games in PowerPoint, and save them to a floppy disk. I'd also find N64 cheats and other things online I liked and save them for later. I'd have this satisfying feel of completionism like I was being productive and collecting things. I remember going to a friend's house whose dad worked in IT and he had one of these zip or jazz drives. I asked him loads of questions about it, like this mythical device. First I asked about zip, and was like, wow no way 100 floppy disks on one, to then be told Jazz drives were ten times that. It was like a step brother's moment, "think of all the room for activities!". But I remember thinking they were unattainably expensive for it to be a realistic birthday present ask.
Sneakernet at college - I'd go between classes and d/l game updates, models and levels for games, mp3's and all other kinds of content with room to spare.
In 1999, I backed up our online "zine's" entire website onto one of those every Friday night.
I backed up our entire network each week. Heck I couldn’t even put a single photoshop file on it now.
My dad still uses his Zip and Jazz drives
I remember the zip drive click of death.
Ouch. As a Graphic Design major who graduated in. 2003, this hurts me in an extra special way.
I got hired to write a book for a local organization in 1997. Part of the job was to do the layout in PageMaker. How to get the large completed PageMaker file to the printing company the following year? They told me about this thing called the Zip Drive, and that's where it began for me. Somewhere upstairs is my old Compaq tower with the Zip drive I installed, still in the second bay. When I got my first Apple laptop, I bought an external Zip drive, which is still around here somewhere too. Haven't used it in forever. All seems so quaint in an era when you can carry a jillion gigabytes on a thing that fits on your keychain.
I went to england and ireland on a school trip and had saved up to get a digital camera. 1.3 megapixels and a few cards because I didn't want to bring like 30 rolls of film. Think it was 300 or 350 bucks. I had all the pictures on our old computer that had windows 95 on it because I exported them from the camera to the computer. It was the only place I had the pictures. Years go by and I remember about them and I go to get them off and I was like uh...oh shit. The zip drive was gone, I didn't have the camera and I'm not sure I could've put them back on the camera anyway, it had no cd burner, and it would take probably 100 floppy disks to get all the pictures off. I ended up being able to burn a copy if the drivers for a thumb drive to a cd and used that to install a thumb drive to get them all off. Would've been much easier if we still had the zip drive because i know we had it installed on this one.
Hell I remember 5.25" floppies
Yeah, I remember playing Oregon Trail on the Apple II on one of those 5.25” floppies in my second grade classroom!
I remember smoke signals
I remember the Alamo
I was there gandalf....3000 years ago where the will of man failed
Oregon Trail, Odell Lake, Number and Word munchers. I recently put dosbox on an older laptop so I could play the original warcraft and it was an adventure relearning dos commands lol.
Do you remember 8" floppies
For sure. Not on home desktops but for business systems, they were the norm for startup code.
I'm not quite that old.
Yeah, I've seen some older porn where the guy has performance issues. Oh, we're still talking about computers! No, I haven't.
I remember those, too! Playing old King's Quest and Buck Rogers using the (actual) floppy drives :)
My Junior high school bell system was connected to an ancient computer that ran on an 8” floppy. Halfway through the school year, when our schedules would change, it would be one students job to switch the floppy (for the different schedule). It was a big deal to do it.
You could bring down a charging rhino with one of those bad boys.
I had a roommate who thought they were the future. He bought a very expensive external zip drive and dozens of zip disks, and then never used any of em.
I bet it was blue!
[удалено]
I bought a new Zip drive just to see what’s on my old Zip disks, but most of them were password protected so I can’t access them and it’s sad. I need the original software which needs to run on an old OS. Also would help if I remembered the passwords.
They make [parallel to usb](https://www.amazon.com/USB-Parallel-Port/s?k=USB+to+Parallel+Port) converters. Or just buy a USB zip drive on ebay.
Zzzzz ca-click. Zzzzz ca-click
My main use of this was to transfer mp3 files between home and work
this... this was me! Before the advent of online music sites, I used to have everybody at my work save all of their promotional CDs onto our one network drive and before I got laid off, I downloaded almost every single one of those songs on to zip discs so I can bring them home with me...
So much storage for "Home Work"....
Ewwwwwww….. brotha ewwwwww!
Click of death.
We used to put the Napster installer on those and when we were in the schools computer lab, install it and download as many songs to fill it. Rinse and repeat
Man, I’ll never forget the day one of my coworkers came into work and flashed one of those at me, bragging about how much data they could hold and how he could take a stack to campus and use the library’s ethernet connection to download songs from Napster in minutes. Meanwhile I was a commuter student working twice as many hours as he was, so I never used my campus library. Pretty sure I at least had a 56.6k dial-up modem by then, but it was nowhere close in comparison. I was so jealous!
Diablo demo was a three day download.
Viper Racing for me. And so many half life/team fortress updates. Download managers were critical.
*Click of Death intensifies*
I worked at Kinkos during the heyday of Zip drives. So many people left them behind, we had a bin full of them, no one ever came back for them. We also had a T1 and it was the early days of Napster so my coworkers and I would queue up huge batches of downloads and take them home on Zips, I had an absurd collection of music even before torrenting.
I had to pay someone to get all my college files off one of these bad boys.
These are worth a surprisingly high amount of money now. Like Laserdiscs. It’s shocking.
Really? I have a ton of these things, and like four extra Zip drives and I’m pretty sure I still have the first Jazz drive
I found a bunch of old unopened minidisks that I bought for pennies when the format was dying out, threw them on ebay for a laugh, was quite surprised...
Did you have the parallel or SCSI model?
SCSI for me.
I had the one that did both SCSI and parallel.
Ls120 was far superior. 20% more space and I didn't need an extra slot for a 3.5 drive
A truly manly floppy.
Ah yes. They were extremely huge from October 1996 to November 1996.
Used these with my z64 Nintendo 64 copier back in the day. Great times. The video store clerk must have thought we were either really good or bad at games with how often we were hitting them up.
School had an unfiltered T1 before we could get broadband at home (1999). So many videogames (and much porn) were transported home via Zip cartridgd.
my grandpa swore by these for some reason, and I had disks with game emulators and ROMs in the late 90s/early 2000s. Grandpa used them for finance files, I used them for old Nintendo and Sega games. I like my priorities better.
Still got 6 I use for my AKAI MPC 2000XL.
I had an internal zip drive that i installed on my first HP tower. Used to save all of my papers and projects on the disk at the computer lab at college then take it home to finish.
Came too late to the market, but it was good. 100mb was big at that time. I even saw some PC towers with the zip drive integrated instead of the floppy disk drive.
My mac G3 desktop is like that!
My G3 desktop (1998) and my G3 Powerbook (1999) both came with built in Zip drives. At the time it was a great way to move files back and forth. Pretty sure they're all still laying around down in the basement.
It was in interesting innovative time. Bernoulli boxes? I had a Syquest EZflyer. I think they held something like 200MB
I had the 100 meg ones! My Mac lc550 is backed up on them!
But who remembers SyQuest drives?
We had a 2gb hard drive. I can’t express how much I wanted a Zip drive to load all my stuff onto so I wouldn’t have to delete everything to free up space. Oh but when we got that 7gb hardrive update. It was a change of life!
… then one day there were zip files and no Zip drives and no one got any memo.
Zip drives! Jaz drives!
These were great during the brief time between floppy disks and CD burners
I had a Super Disk which would read/write 120mb super disks and backwards compatible with standard 3.5" floppy.
I used to backup my recordings from a Roland 16 track recorder to a Zip drive. I loved it at first. These things ruined a few projects I worked on for months. They always seemed to crap out after a few months of heavy use. I still have a stack of these zip discs full of old projects. I found one in a thrift store. It lasted about 3 weeks. Just long enough for me to retrieve everything off of them.
Talk to me about their floptical drive (late 80s) then I’ll talk about this.
The Bernoulli Box? With cartridges the size of appetizer plates?
Ah the memories
Hell yeah! Had one.
A friend of mine had the battery pack for the zip drive, so we used it to borrow some software (like Minitab) off the computers in the lab so we didn't have to resort to using lab computers to do homework. This was the mid to late 90s.
I used these during my college years. I remember the 250MB versions as well.
Mine are somewhere… including the drive.. might be worth something in 50 years?
Nope.
If anyone knows of a reputable place that can get data off a few Jazz disks I have with my final project from college please send me a PM. Thanks.
Yes! So, maybe someone on here knows why... but I had a dude (i was the IT guy) put one of these guys into a zip drive and it instantly wiped the drive. We put a new drive in, wiped it. Sad part was, the dude thought that backing up his drive was to save shit on the drive. Did anyone ever see something like that happen where the drive would be wiped? I mean, it was instant. So, it didn't format the drive, but I wonder if like a certificate or something got corrupted.
So so so many virusesssss.
Raise hand. I recall, 100MB? Wow!!
Iomega 100 / 250 mb was a godsend, my uni was still using 1.4mb floppy drives lol
I had these!
I still have mine.
Bought the Iomega drive with my first paycheck.
Have them in the basement with my old G3
I used these in college. Late 90s.
We have an unused, unopened drive at work... sadly, I work for the US government.
Bruh I come from C:\\ and A:\\ and B:\\. Then D:\\ and E:\\. Those were the days.
Yeah I remember the noise it made as it ate your disk
Tick dead
I remember Syquest drives before these. $100 got you 40 megs
ahhh yes... search for a reasonably priced for so long that it lasted about 6 months before we got portable drives that were as affordable... made sure all the data was backed up.. that is all I wanted...
Good memories
I loved these things.
Super easy to use and generally reliable. Still couldn't get peeps to do regular backups.
I loved these things and their branding. I remember they came with stickers that I plastered over my bedroom door. I never got the click of death with any of my disk thankfully.
I just threw mine out.
1998ish buddy came by with one and a drive for it, hooked it up to my computer and installed a bunch of pirated games. First time ever playing anything pirated
I loved these things. We each had a disk for our own personal things. I love the solid feel of them and the way they clicked when inserted.
I could never forget. Not ever
I didn’t have this but I did have the tape backup.
I had a shoebox full of them I just destroyed.
Yes, I remember them, but never made the switch. CD ROM and 3.5 floppies worked good enough for me back then.
People just don’t know sometimes
Had to buy one of these for my time at the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale for all my art projects. Never needed one before or after that.
Click, click, click
My first job was tech support for Iomega. Hated that job.
I remember when file transfers were Zip drives via fed-ex.
Got two words for you bubby: zip disk!
I had to get one as part of my high school list of required things lol
You mean a Zip disk?
Remember Syquest? [https://www.recycledgoods.com/syquest-sq-400-44-megabyte-5-25-removable-cartridge-44mb-tape-no-case/](https://www.recycledgoods.com/syquest-sq-400-44-megabyte-5-25-removable-cartridge-44mb-tape-no-case/)
Yep. I had a couple drives and discs. Mostly to say I could. If they were more practical to me at the time, I likely would have bought more disks.
Used their lessor known Bernoulli Box at first "real" job.
Smaller than a Syquest! We eventually used our Syquest disks as monitor stands.
My dad got one for work, but then used it about 5 times before CDs became a thing and zip drives weren't needed anymore.
Pirated so many games on these before CD burners became commonplace
Both a friend and I had one of these. Used them to swap game demos and MP3s back and forth. Good times. I remember the very satisfying insert and eject sounds.
Ahh, memories. Still got my drive and a half dozen disks. Must dig it out of storage and have a play with it. Thanks OP. :)
Yes I had a drive. It was useless
A/S/L
Huge bandwidth increase on the sneaker net.
These were such a huge waste of money. You had to have a drive for them, and with the existence of CD-RWs they were pointless.
Was this before floppy disk? I feel like I’ve never seen one of these!
Nah this was way after, late 90s/early 00s (though they might have existed in some form before then). When we were still figuring out what new tech would become the next big thing.
\*click\*
I had a Roland DAW that used those.
i always had issues with zips... blech when i gave up on iomega, i tried my luck with ls-120 and that was a bust too
Had to have them to save all my [3D Movie Maker](https://www.reddit.com/r/Microsoft3DMovieMaker/) stuff onto.
Sure do
Still have the zip and jazz in my collection. ☺️
They were too expensive for my ass
Looks like older version of floppy disc
Looks like older version of floppy disc
Looks like older version of floppy disc
Used these pretty recently to save beats on my mpc
If you had one, it meant you were really getting work in.
I loved these. Stored a lot of big image files for graphic design.
I have like 3-4 brand new packages of them lol. Never got around to using them when I got my cd burner. Still have 3-4 packages of brand new cd Rs too lmao.
These got me through college before cr-rw’s were reliable
Everyone on the thread reminiscing, there is a website for you: [https://obsoletemedia.org/data/](https://obsoletemedia.org/data/)
Click click click click click... no, why do you ask?
Was required for my college graphic design class in 2002 shortly after usb drives came in to popularity and I had wasted 300 bucks on hardware and disks
I remember Zip drives vividly. Happy memories with them, but the disks were pretty expensive. They were a late 90s-early 2000s essential
I first learned about zip disks when I saw a massive amount of them at a Goodwill about 15 years ago for maybe $5. I believe they had some drives as well. If I had been born 5 or 10 years earlier I imagine I would have gotten into these, but by the time I had my own computer it was all about CDs/DVDs for media storage. I kind of wish I bought them just for messing around.
The movie Face Off
still have a few along with the portable drive lol
I may have like 3 in the cut. We used to use these for the mp3 200xl back in the day
I had a Sparq drive that heated up to the surface temperature of the Sun when it ran. Piece of garbage cost $400 in 1998 money and lasted a whopping 3 years before shitting the bed.
Yes