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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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