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cross-posted from: https://lemmit.online/post/2824472
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The original was posted on /r/nostalgia by /u/singleguy79 on 2024-05-03 04:24:44.
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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.
That’s more or less how certain public clouds manage migrations in some cases.
I’ve watched a company load up 2PB of data into a tape library, have them stack it full of bubblewrap, then roll it onto the back of a truck with the tires deflated for a softer ride, then driven across town to a new datacentre at 3am on a Sunday.
Effective data rate: 1PB per hour.
The bandwidth’s okay, but the latency sucks.
click - your data is lost
I liked them anyways. The IDE drives were fast and cheap, CD-R was still too expensive.
I still remember getting my first TDK burner, and going through mad numbers of CD-Rs due to failed writes. Those will always be the days.
In the end we just lugged around hard drives and used a quick swap bay.
These days you have USB hard drive docks.
Remember MiniDisc? The one and only true storage medium! Hail MiniDisc!
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.
Neo used MiniDisc in Matrix. 'Nuf said.
IOMEGA! IOMEGA! ONE ZIP DISK TO RULE THEM ALL! ALL SHALL BOW!
But yeah. I may be nostalgic, but MiniDiscs were GOAT af, let’s be real.
Mine was password protected and had Bulma’s boobs and incredibly confusing feelings stored on it
Omg I’ve heard USB sticks be called “zip drives” before. I had no idea they were something entirely their own!
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.
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!
This just reminded me that parallel port switches were a thing. You could change the dial or push a button to switch peripherals on port A or B.
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
A company named “100MEGA Distribution”, a Czech computer parts vendor (incorporated in 1994) has one of these framed at the reception.
ah, geek humor … “iomega” → “100MEGA”
No, the capacity was 100 MB, and we’d say “100 mega” [🔊 sto megga] for short in Czech.
As a computer parts & accessories store, they definitely sold these disks at some point in the 90s.
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.
Click! Click! Click!..
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.
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 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.
They had some really, um, 90s commercials: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppniBSWGgcg
And another thing I haven’t worried about in close to thirty years: the Bermuda Triangle
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You probably know this, but for anyone curious: Firewire was a different port/cable format than USB, and was used almost exclusively by Apple and Sony.
Punk ass kids like me appreciate the context lol.
God love universal. Work in a retirement home and have a bucket full of old cords for when running into older hardware.
I took for granted how easy it is to connect things now.
Things are much easier now, to be sure. The Mac/Amiga IOMega Zip drives actually used SCSI (pronounced “Skuzzy”), which was much faster than the parallel ports we Windows users got. I hope you don’t have to deal with SCSI! The myriad connector types were a pain, and the termination was no fun.
Lots of video cameras and analog (eg. Composite video) to digital video converters had FireWire interfaces. At the time Apple (Final Cut Pro) and Sony (Vegas) also dominated the video editing software market.
That’s true, it was big in the media world for a minute. Perhaps because Sony Vaio and Apple computers were used heavily in that space?
As I recall, Firewire was faster and more capable than USB, but USB was cheaper to implement on small stuff like mice and keyboards, so it became the defacto standard.
I just bought a drive for my retro machine
