I used to work in the graphics industry and these were essential before USB drives. Kept mountains of logos and art files and were quickly interchangeable.
Yep, same in the printing industry. Pretty much up until the mid 2000's, ZIP drives were common for graphic artists bringing in files, or for moving files to and from older systems that didn't have network capabilities, such as imagesetters. It wasn't until the late 2000's when USB drives finally came down in price that we were able to phase them out completely. Of course, everything today is networked together, and everything external come from LFT off the internet. I think once in the last 3 years, a very old-school artist came in with files on a ZIP drive. Luckily, I still keep one around that works! 😆
I loved these things. Back in high school my friends and I would trade software on stacks of 15+ 3.5 formatted AOL floppies held together with rubber bands. Zip drives changed our lives.
These were the best thing ever when I first started college in the late '90s (1997-99) when our Macs didn't have enough HDD space, and we were in graphics classes. We could store an entire semester's worth of projects on one or two of these bad boys and take them with us. They were virtually indestructible and made classes that much more fun when you walked in with your Zip disk and knew you were ready to go for the day. Good times.
This bring back memories. I started art school in 1999, had a few of these in different colours for different things (can’t remember now, different projects? Different classes?). Those PowerMac G3 at school all had internal zip drive, and because those PowerMac G3 has its own translucent green case if you remember those, I’m sure they had it custom ordered from Apple as the zip drive has the official green translucent cover! I also end up bought that internal drive for reading them at home. I had forgotten about that internal drive until this video popped into my recommendation!
@@OutdoorsWithShawn That’s why you should *always* backup, backcup and backup. :) Enough scare stories about people losing book manuscripts or master thesises due to the harddisk dying or the computer getting stolen.
Random aside: Those decade old Zip disks are still four times larger than the maximum size allowed for an email on Gmail (25MB). Email really hasn't kept up with the rest of technological evolution.
Grumbel Although the total free storage space has increased significantly. I seem to remember Hotmail only allowed 20MB email storage for your whole inbox unless you upgraded to a paid plan.
Democritus86 But that reasoning was made all the more redundant when those same providers launched their cloud storage services, and even give you the option to provide a sharing link to, for example, a OneDrive or Google Drive file, whilst composing an email.
That's because of all the dingbats that insist on just leaving files attached to emails for some nebulous later date. I've watched email space be increased and decreased repeatedly over the last 20 years.
When I was in college, zip discs were a requirement. My college had made a deal with a computer company and there were zip drives in every college-owned computer. I got used to them in a hurry, and honestly, for quick data transfer, they were awesome. They didn't have the wait time of burning a CD, and USB was still pretty new back then, and unreliable. I loved my zip drives. My desktop had an internal. My mom's computer had a SCSI. What I loved about almost every single external zip drive was the eject button. Those things could shoot a disc across the room and hurt somebody. It was hilarious.
Damn I miss those times. I remember feeling so jealous when they first came out and a 3.5 1.2MB drive was the best drive I had. When I finally bought one I went crazy copying all sorts of programs, files, games, music. Then again WAV files were ridiculously large. Learned the hard way about the eject button when it shot out and spilled my soda can over me.
@@VideoCesar07 Are you sure it was a 3.5" Floppy? The old 5 1/4" disks went up to 1.2 MB in high density mode. the 3.5's did 1.44MB in high density mode, and they did a 2.88MB drive in that size too, but I think it was expensive, and didn't gain traction. I remember using programs back in the day to do custom formats to disks, which increased the capacity, and sometimes let you use a couple of extra tracks (80-82,83), and more sectors per track to squeeze more data in. It was drive and media dependent, but you could usually squeeze a little more data in. I think I got up to 1.5MB in some cases on 5 1/4 disks.
@@lesleymunro4964 I stand corrected. It's been sooooooo long. Your numbers are correct. When the 3.5s came out it was a great jump forward to the 2.88 capacity but still a bit hindered...until I discovered zip files and later on, the ability to split them into multiple smaller files. Crazy to think that today a multi-gig file can be shared via broadband when a 10MB file was considered large at the time. Now I feel I missed out since I never got to use the custom formats.
My parents have had one, lovingly stored in its original box in a closet for the last 20 years, that my Dad is still pissed off about buying and every now and then mentions like it's still a relevant technology. Case in point, last summer when I told them to get a 5TB USB drive to back up all of their machines. Dad asked why he couldn't use "that drive thing you made me buy" to do it... Pretty much every time something better came along I have had to explain why it was no longer relevant. USB sticks, flash cards, CD-Rs, DVD-Rs, USB hard drives, BD-Rs, etc, etc... Dad is still holding on to the dream and still pissed about the $200 that only was viable for about 2 years.
Thanks for posting this great video and bringing back many memories. I was on the Zip Drive design committee and was the Technical Support Manager at Iomega at that time for 5 years. Previously I'd been a field sales engineer for 5 years with Iomega starting when they had the 8 inch 10Mb Bernoulli drives. My staff in Technical Support came up with the idea of having a window on the Zip drive. I had a pile of Zip and Bernoulli drives and disks that I kept for years. I posted them on Craig's List and got ZERO responses for anyone wanting to buy them. After a few weeks of posting with no results, I just threw them all in the trash. All of my Bernoulli and Zip data fit on one flash drive thus explaining why the technology became obsolete.
I never buy from Craig's List. They've earned a really bad reputation. If you couldn't sell 'em you could've donated them to a computer tech museum (like the one in Boston), Good Will or other thrift store, etc. Such a waste to throw out old tech like that.
@@SlowPCGaming1 Considering how much sh!t I saved on Iomega Zip disks in college, I have to agree with this. I don't know about Bernoulli, but had Rick Kaylor sold his surplus Zip disks and drives (if brand new) on eBay rather than craigslist, he would have made a bundle. There are still many eBay listings for Zip disks and drives today, and while I couldn't care less about the 100 or 250 mb models, the harder to find 750 mb model is still useful, yet backwards compatible with the smaller capacity disks. I was editor of my college newspaper, and delivered the finished product to the on-campus printing press via Zip disk. This TH-camr decided not to review Iomega Jaz drives, but the media on those could store 1 GB and 2 GB disks, and all the commercial art students swore by them. 💁🏻♂️💾 🏆
@@TuNnL I remember the Jaz drives. I used to use those at work at the time. 1 GB on a disk was like "wow", considering my computer at the time only had about 750 meg hard drive. Anybody remember the SyJet drives that SyQuest put out around the same time? Those held about 1.5 GB. I still have one and at least 2 disks (maybe three). I will have to dig that thing out and see if it still works.
I'm a former printer and I can say the reason manufacturers started using the folded manual format is because it is cheaper to just print and fold a piece of paper than to fold, trim, and staple (actually is stitching, not staples) the manual. They could end up saving up to 5 - 6 cents per manual and with the volume they needed, could end up saving tens of thousands of dollars in production. Also I remember when zip disks were THE format companies and designers used when submitting their print projects, mainly for the storage capacity. It got to the point we had to put a return disk fee onto the disks so people could get them back.
When I read "I'm a former printer" I wondered if your comment was a story about how you evolved into an all-in-one printer/scanner/fax/copier over time or something.
@Max William Lauf I can confirm this also, it was the format we used as the disk were cheaper to ship than other media at the time and it was quick (relatively) to get data onto and off them. We had a kid that would run the disks between the studio and print house all day long, just running disks back and fourth.
I seriously doubt my comment will be seen anymore, but the latest driver for the LPT ZIP drive includes a program called "Parallel Port Accelerator", that signficantly improves the LPT ZIP drive speeds on both reading and writing. I would recommend checking that out.
FYI: There is a hole on the back that you can stick a paper clip in to eject the disk with no power- similar to the ones on the front of CD drives, but takes very little pressure.
Then I found out that my backup that I placed on ZIP drive discs could not be read when I changed computers and the newer 750 drive.. 22 Paper weight discs.
@@nucflashevent There was likely no way to save it at that point, but basic backwards compatibility would have given them a few more years of viability. In the long run, nothing much; but it expedited the demise.
My G4 Mac had a built-in Zip drive. I also had a SCSI for my PowerMac and a USB drive. The worst part of the Click of Death was it would spread; If a disk got the CoD, it had to be destroyed. If the disk was put into a different drive, that drive would get the CoD. Any disk put in a CoD-affected drive would also get the CoD. It was the bubonic plague of floppy storage.
13:31 That transition! I loved it! I went to lean in closer to see better and the capture footage zoomed in my face. Been a while since I've been pleasantly startled. =D
My Zip drive would have been worth having if the backup disk hadn't somehow corrupted itself almost instantly, in safe storage & with almost zero use lol
@@MegaZeta I backed up after every time I finished entering data on a daily basis. I backing it up twice on two different discs. I also replaced the discs after a year of use. Never had one fail. Ironically, my first flash drive took a lot of personal data with it when it decided it was no longer formatted on the short side of being a year old. It was "solid state" I thought all these original single copies will be safe. Bad idea.🤦♂️
@@pflaffik If it was on a Zip Drive, then in fact it's the Zip Drive that held the data. The fact is I restored my data from a Zip Drive. The fact of how you're backing up data has nothing to do with the fact it is important to back up data. The reality is a Zip Drive served me well. Thanks for your circular logic that serves no one for anything.
Not really, USB and plug-n-play made the Zip drive better. Mostly made obsolete by cheaper & more reliable CD-R, larger & cheaper hard disks, and increasing use of networking/internet/e-mail for file transfer. Flash memory sticks were more the last nail in the coffin. When these first came out they were really a godsend.
The zip drive came out just as I was starting art/design college. I used them all the way through college until they went obsolete. At the time they were the only viable option for carrying around and copying large-ish graphics files. Much more handy than burning a CD.
I got involved with Iomega in their Bernoulli Box days. I wrote and sold a driver for the Bernoulli Box for the QNX operating system, now owned by BlackBerry. When the Zip 100 come along I wrote drivers for both the SCSI and Parallel Port versions. The Parallel Port version was just a Parallel Port interface in front of SCSI. They were a really good technology at the time.
I loved my Parallel Zip drive! I had a little case and would ride my bike to friends places and copy games. 100 MB was quite substantial back on those days and the parallel interface was super easy to use.
SCSI for the win (of the original two models). Several friends and I all bought Zip drives when they first came out, but for some reason they got the parallel ones... one buddy quickly realized his mistake and swapped it for the SCSI version while the store still would let him. The difference between the two models, especially back, then was truly astonishing. The parallel port one behaved as an awesome tape backup drive should have (without all of the whirring noises, rewinding and tensioning the tape, etc lmao those things sucked so much) but was too slow to use as a hard disk. The SCSI one was a baby hard disk. I spent most of my time on Sun Unix and Dos/Windoze back then, but quite a bit on Mac too doing scanning work and similar. All of those PowerPC Macs they had on campus at the time were running a few OS versions behind the current, and also had Extensions up the wazoo loading on boot. The neat thing was they all had a SCSI port on the back, so I could just plug in. They even had a few Zip drives in the lab too, but I had my own so that lived in a little carrying case with room for my important dozen or so disks, the brick and the SCSI cord. So I set up a few Zip disks as Mac-boot drives; you just reboot the Mac and hold down a funny four button combo and it forced the machine to boot from external SCSI devices... so I would be sitting there in the lab running the most up to date OS version with only the extensions I needed loaded - using RamDoubler and all sorts of fun tools - and still had access to the Lab server so I could use PhotoShop and the other toys; I could mount my Aufs volume (data stored on my unix account) too for fun and games. Let me also say... Marathon came out around then ^^ muhahaha. Zip disk (SCSI) was amazing. But hey, even the slow parallel port one was pretty sweet!
I used to work in a support center in the late 90's for HP and Zip drives. The fail rate was very high for them and the usual trouble call WAS the "click of death"
Eventually all technology becomes obsolete. Someday TH-cam will be obsolete. While buying 100mb storage today will sound stupid, back when these things were popular 100mb was super-duper-huge, when compared to the 1.44mb floppy.
@@karfsma778 Those were write once media. During the peak of the 100mb's popularity, CD-RW drives were expensive and kinda rare. They were also a lot slower than zip drives.
@@dr.insaneoiv You know that you're watching this _on_ TH-cam, right? That it is still, by a _huge_ margin, the most popular vidoe site on the Internet, right? It will become obsolete, and it is likely already headed that way now (spurred in no small part by poor decisions and advertisers-first business strategies from TH-cam management and Google above them), but it is far from obsolete now.
Not only was the click of death awful, but it was contagious. A ZIP disk that went through a bad drive could, and often did, break the replacement drive. I saw it all the time when working support for a company that used them in their stores for backup.
Having worked in the same field at the same time, I suspect that many of the "contagious" damage was thanks to people attempting to repair their cod disks. Broken hinges, stuff shoved into the case to "clean" the heads, the myth that you could fix it with a sharp rap against the edge of the table... Of course, they never would admit it, but we knew, we knew...
I literally just encountered the click of death and bad disk killing zip drives problem this past week! I had used zip disks to backup my high school files in the mid 90s. I recently found the disks again but didn't have the drive. So I bought a used zip drive usb. I was able to recover one disk, but then it couldn't read one of the other disks. Strangely, I found that the same drive suddenly couldn't re-read the first disk it had successfully read. So I thought the used zip drive had suddenly crapped out. So then I decided to go on eBay and buy a new in box zip 100 usb drive. The good disk read no problem. Once i got to the second disk however, the drive couldn't read it, and then failed to read the good disk also. There was an obvious clicking noise coming from both the used and new drives. A Google search later, I discovered the click of death and bad disks killing good drives issue which I hadn't known about. So I had just wasted two good zip drives just trying to recover my high school data with no success. Argh! Anyway, awesome episode of LGR Oddware as usual, Clint!
I remember having a love/hate relationship with Zip drives. When they worked, I thought they were great, when they failed (usually the external parallel drives) it was pretty aggravating especially considering the data loss. The internal drives were much more reliable (at least for me).
It's so irritating that Apple never included anything higher than 100 mb in their internal Zip drives, though. Had the PowerMacs offered that, I might have had a reason to buy it rather than a MacBook Pro, which died on me after just seven and a half years. In the post-pandemic era, I'm at the point where a 2010-12 Mac Pro desktop actually makes more sense from a value standpoint than buying a whole new MacBook Pro. Other than 100 mb and 250 mb, I couldn't find any NIB internal Iomega internal drives online, so if I get one for nostalgia it will have to be external. 💁🏻♂️💾
Curious to know how this worked out. My experience with Zip drives, albeit as a very early adopter, was that the disks constantly corrupted themselves via cosmic rays or something, meaning, while in safe storage with little use
I swear, this channel is totally getting me through this quarantine! I've never enjoyed working from home (too many distractions) but this channel helps. A LOT! I have a thing for vintage 3D software so anything 3D is awesome! FYI - I had the carry case for my Zip drive. You bet your ass I felt like like a gangsta!
When Zip Disks first came out they were ground breaking.... Nothing else was available that could move that amount of data that quickly or easily. Because the drive was portable and easy to setup on PC or MAC it wasn't a limitation that the other computer didn't have the drive. Even in the early days or CDR these were still easier to use... Early PC CDR was very hit and miss in terms of compatibility between various media and drives... Plus CDR was slow!
Hit and miss is RIGHT! I remember when we got our first cd burner; my brother was copying pictures for a friend, and when I walked in the room he winced a little, "Don't stomp around so much, I'm burning a disk."
Yup! I remember making a lot of coasters when burners first came out. Using a burner in college, the blanks (in the college book store) were 14.99 each. I remember, because I also remember writing the disk in 2x, and thinking "good god.. can it go that fast without making another coaster?! 15 freaking bucks here!"
Astro Gamer to the Rescue! Thank you so much! When I typed the comment i thought to myself "Crap, is it disc or disk? Whatever, I got a 50/50 shot and if it's wrong I'm sure someone will call me out on it"
I always felt like in a alternate universe, Nintendo would have reached out to Iomega to make Zip Disks the format for the N64 back in 1996. Even at 100MB it would have been a substantial step up from those original carts (which on average were only 8MB).
the point is the games didn't need more than 8MB. And have you seen the state of some of the cartridges? kids dont look after their stuff, i trade a few games and sometimes they were scuffed up and dirty, a zipdisk wouldn't be able to put up with the abuse.the metal cover would be destroyed in a week of buying.
@@Professional_TH-cam_Commenter They lost the Final fantasy series because they kept the 8 mb cartridge. It wasn't the only one, From what I could understand.
I had the internal IDE version and loved it. I remember they were priced much less than the parallel port version and, as you discovered, were Windows plug’n’play devices.
OMG I was actually on the r&d team on designing the zip and jazz drives. Here was the thing. iOmega came to our marketing class and asked out to come up with a design. The iOmega office was only like 2 miles from the high school. The high school had college classes from Weber University as electives for Roy High School. I was just lucky enough to be taking many college credit classes and was included in the team. Oh memories.
Shadow Heart oh I am sure it was. I mean yea I was a programmer at the time and was making my own games, and I was also taking engineering work with cad, but they came to our marketing class to figure out a case design. I mean who the hell does that. They were not the only company. Coke came to us on testing their new plastic bottle design. And some other company came to us for repurposing and building block design that was found to be a major chocking hazard. We were in marketing, not design. It was insanity.
I would personally like to thank you from the bottom of my heart for helping bring this into the world. Without you I might have had to store my early internet downloaded porn on thousands of floppy disks! But thanks to you 3 years worth of porn fit on 1 disk! Because back then there was literally only 100 megs of porn online! lol
I had an internal Zip drive installed on my computer in the late 90's. I thought these things were great. I couldn't believe they had not overtaken floppy discs. I never had any problem with the drive or any Zip Disk's I bought. Thanks for the memories.
Same here, used it for backups until a 100 count cake box of CD-Rs dropped to $20 and the burners were stable at 40x speed...then the ZIP disks were bye bye. But glad to see you showing the Akai MPC-3000 which had SCSI on it to expand sample storage and off load sequences.
Bought a Mac G4 (Sawtooth) with the internal Zip drive pre-installed from Apple (probably 2000). At some point I should really make a point of checking out what files I stored on those disks.
I used to have a ton of 100 and 250mb zip disks and eventually most of them stopped being able to be read by both the built-in and the external zip drive i had. not sure if all the disks failed or both drives failed, but there were certainly some quality issues.
Same. Our family Compaq Presario computer had an internal zip drive. Each member of the family had their own zip100 disk to put whatever he wanted on it. That was a lot of storage space in 1998!
Takes me back to the early days of Napster, when I used my Zip Drive to download all the music I could want exploiting the faster internet connection of the high school technology lab.
I went to F. I. T. for illustration, i thought i was going to become a comic artist. i dropped out after a teacher stole my friends assignment for an ad campaign. shortly after another friend who "Made it" confided in me after her gallery showing in Manhattan that she just wanted to marry someone and buy curtains and salad bowls all day ... heartbroken i became a manager at a hardware store and now I'm a stay at home dad. wahmp wahmp but i wouldn't change a thing
Pretty much the same here. The local university (which I later attended) installed them in 1996 and I used to cruise over there to download warez out of my T3 shell account and take them back home. When I started attending that school in 1999 most of the labs had discontinued them and by 2000 they were flat out gone entirely. Weirdly enough, floppy disks remained supported through the rest of my degree program, which I completed in 2006.
+WritersOnTheWall That teacher is shady as fuck. Damn... some people really don't have shame. Yes making a good living out of freelance illustration is extremely though, not many people make it and it's not for everyone either
Lol, same as the rest here! We were all required to have zip disks for our art class photoshop projects back in the late 90s.. I liked them for what they did back then.
I had one of these back in the day - the parallel port version too. Although it was slow, it was way way faster than using PKZIP and PKUNZIP to span something large over multiple 1.44MB floppy disks. I loved that zip drive.
I remember always wanting such an Iomega ZIP drive when I saw it in the stores. I used to back up stuff onto 3.5" floppies and then years later burning them onto CDs, but that CD burner was veeeery expensive in the year 2000 :D. 18:21 when you use the google website stopwatch instead of the built-in one of your clock :D
I kept my games and porn on ZIP disks when I was 13. Good times, it was as large as the HDD on my computer, so it was like having a whole other computer for myself.
When I was in community college, I edited the school newspaper and operated out of a "student media group." We oddly had a position called "systems administrator" as in the mid to late 1990s, there were apparently still a shocking number of computer illiterate students (including the editor-in-chief I replaced). That systems admin guy apparently was used to this idea, and had been hoarding zip disks to store all of his porn collection. Me and Cynthia, my photographer were an ambitious team burning through these disks fast, and when we started running low, we ransacked the place looking for the surplus. Low and behold, we found stacks of unlabeled disks. And when we tested them out, they all had folders named "A," "B," "C," and all the way down the alphabet. The letters represented all porn images and videos which had names beginning with "A," or "B" or "C," etc. Needless to say, there were only just over a dozen Zip disks, but we later found out the guy had the rest of them at home for "evaluation purposes." 👏🍆 💦
I thought one of my local thrift outlets was lame till one day it got stocked with LOADS of electronics, like they were spilling into the floor. Never saw so many LCD monitors there, but they were not something I need at the time
I recently moved and my parents were deciding on two homes and my dad made the final choice on the one im in now simply because it's goodwill had better stuff. He figured that the niceness of the things that are donated show how good the neighborhood is
I remember these well - started with a parallel PC one, upgraded to the transparent blue USB version and then moved on. I remember working in my first design studio that had an ‘internal’ Zip drive fitted in a Mac - it was even colour coded to the Mac (cream) instead of a floppy drive - felt like the future! Remember the funky colour disks too - good times (until the click of death!)
Jake Brake I remember in my art school, there was that one zip drive that eject harder than normal, not only the disk would got shot out some distance, the recoil so strong the whole drive itself knocked backward an inch!
I remember when these came out, and they were extremely useful. Hard drive space was precious and expensive to upgrade, and moving data from your computer to a friend's computer was extremely difficult without some sort of larger media, not to mention for small businesses and home users to do backups with (these were supported in most all programs at the time). There was also a large difference in running on your parallel port depending on how you had your port set (SPP vs EPP and ECP modes). The 750MB drive could read and write 250MB and 750MB disks, but could only read the 100MB disks (if I'm remembering correctly).
12:26 Notice the red switch of death ie. the PSU voltage selector. Some wiseass guys periodically switched those at school and *kaboom*, one dead PSU and rig achieved :D The Iomega products were a bit rare in Europe. I remember only seeing a couple of times those 250Mb disks in the 2000 or earlier. But soon CD-R and RW took over permanently and after that came USB memory sticks. Oh those were the days... burning one 650Mb disk took something like one hour or so 20 years ago. We were pretty patient back then!
Do you think you could make a video showing how to properly maintain an older disk drive? I have some 5¼-inch and newer floppy drives and I'd like to make sure they last as long as possible.
+Zes Although it's probably not what you want, but you might wanna buy a cheap (10 bucks or so) USB-floppy drive and use a floppy imager (eg WinImage or Floppy Image) to create 1.44 mb images from every floppy. So you have a bit-perfect backup up of your stuff that you can eg burn to DVD. The images are portable and can be read independent of any hardware, just in case your hardware breaks down.
Have you seen a USB 5¼-inch drive anywhere, because I sure haven't. Also this is hardly going to help with my 1986 DOS computer. Also I'm pretty sure you can't make copies of Amiga disks with a regular USB disk drive because Amiga formatted disks are weird and don't work with PCs, like, at all.
These things were an absolute godsend in the early days of DTP where Mac and Quark and Aldus owned the entire industry. The SCSI zip drive was pretty fast for external media (All Macs of that era had SCSI) in it's day and 100 megs meant you could fit your entire publication (and source art/images) on one piece of media. This was before CD-R was available, before high speed internet, and when the most common way of schlepping files around was 1.44 meg floppies. The zip drive was widely available (You could run down to any office or computer store and pick up drives or media), reasonably priced, and for a time you could see those blue boxes in EVERY office alongside the rainbow apple. I stumbled across a box full of drives and media at the office the other day. Gave me a huge nostalgia buzz. Would love to see LS120 episode in the future.. Make sure to get a motherboard from the pentium era that has explicit LS120 support in the bios. :)
porklaser What, you mean unlike the days of Aldus on a Mac SE where you did page layout, printed out all the pieces on 8.5x11, glued them together, proofread from that/sent that along with the file for printing, and hoped it came out alright? And let's not forget the printed photos that had to be paper clipped to the pages with the xerox copies of them pasted (that were cropped with post-it notes and enlarged/reduced using the photocopier) where they were supposed to go on the page. This is how my high school did page layout and what our printer (local newspaper) received from us until 1999. That was the year we received all new Windows 95 machines, a scanner, and internet access in a lab. I immediately pitched the idea of using publisher (included in the OMG copy of office we had) to do the paper, self scan (and crop, correct, etc) photos, and send out a finished file for printing. We won awards on both methods.
In the case of the SCSI Zip drive for mac: there was some software that you could install but you could use the disks without it provided you had the disk inserted before you turned the computer on.
I always see German words popping up with native English speakers recently. Whats the influx? We've been using English words for 30 years in everyday life.
good to see I'm not totally insane for thinking these were a big mac thing. obviously the IBM world had em too but it seemed like these things were required for mac users for a stretch.
Yeah me too, I buyed scsi card specially for the Zip drive hoping it would be faster and better, idiot of me spending more money to throw it to the trash years later having given so little use
@@FatNorthernBigot - SCSI (at the peak, I had two SCSI adapters in the one CBM A2000 060) enabled me to run some 4-to-6 HDDs, plus a SCSI H.P. Scanjet 4c. I usually had either a tower case for the extra drives, or an old Honeywell-Bull 386 case, with the HD access lamps made visible by drilling small holes through the case front panel, and pushing in plastic bezels. Each drive required setting a separate ID Address by jumpers.
The SCSI version of these are still in demand for the Synthesizer/Sampler market. The Akai MPCs use them for storage of samples without need to swap floppies.
Early 1990s we were using the Syquest EZ drives in our Graphic Design classes because it held 135MB. Then the Zip drive was getting popular due to cost and some of the Mac G4 could be bought with a built-in drive. Every store was carrying the Zip cartridges and the EZ was harder to find. I still have several stacks of Zip 100 and EZ135 cartridges hanging around at home.
I had a Zip drive connected to my family's Mac Performa 637CD when I was a kid. Because it was one of the last of the 680x0 machines, the few games commercially released after that were all geared to require the PowerPC architecture that was being pushed at the time. "Congrats on your new computer, it will never run any new software again!" As a result of that (and the quite limited number of Mac game developers and port specialists), most of the games I played were shareware. Stuff like Ambrosia's lineup, or Realmz, or the Exile games would all fit nicely on a Zip disk (I had 3 disks all to myself, what luxury!). Even with the external SCSI interface it was just fine running these sorts of games.
Ahhh you are so thorough. I was wondering if you were going to being up .zip vs ZIP, and you went a step further and name dropped the person who designed .zip. Bravo. 👏🏻
the success on zip was not just about its price point, the overall user experience was really great. Think about inserting the zip disk to the slot, the snap feels and the access sound was somewhat cool.
I remember drooling over a 750mb zip disk in my old pc hardware shop, back when my 95 pc had a 500 mb harddrive. I wished I could store so much more stuff. (ie: Boobs)
heh, heh. Reminds me, around 2004 I was at Wal-mart buying a 500 gig external hard drive and a new 500 gig internal hard drive and the kid working the cash register was clearly from some deep African country and he was amazed at how much storage was suddenly available (well, so was I) so cheaply and he says to me, "Why you need so much space?" and I looked right at him and said (duh) "Porn!" and for a second he looked at me in shock and then threw his head back and began laughing and I thought it was funny because he was probably brought to America by some Christian church and maybe he actually thought I was kidding...
Ha, I guess I was lucky, porn has never aroused me (just seemed too artificial and aggressive), so I had no reason to fill my precious megabytes with that stuff.
Have tried, it just does not work when I know that they are doing that for each other and not for me nor with me; and the fact that they are doing it for others to watch causes even some repulsion. I get reaction only when a girl looks into my eyes and clearly shows that she wants me and nobody else, and only when I know that she really means it and is not saying it just out of habit. Also, typical "sexy looks" do not work on me; I enjoy petite, quiet and simple looking girls who definitely are far from top-models. I guess, I'm demisexual :D But that's total off-topic here :D
They actually went up to 1GB sizes back when Zip Disks (brand name) were only hitting 256mb, I use to have eight of the 1GB disks which was hilarious because at the time was more than my 4GB Hard drive at the time which was one of the biggest in 1997
It states it on the box: 1. Expand the size of your internal hard drive 2. Take it with you, makes your files portable 3. Back up your hard drive It’s a weak attempt to make it more appealing through advertising ;)
LOL, yeah that list doesn't make a lot of sense, they are more like functions, not 3 distinct types of drives. Crazy 90s adverts, but it worked, I had mine!
What made me sad was the computer industry refusing to standardize these to replace the now useless 1.44 MB floppy. I kept waiting and waiting. The price on the drives sold in my store plunged from $199 to $49. I was sure that this meant my next computer would have one as standard equipment. Sadly, it never happened. Why they never did is something I don't understand. That's like the computer industry refusing to make USB ports standard on their computers and instead insisting on sticking with parallel connectors. However, the customers noticed this big time. Two guys on separate occasions, ran into the store and in VERY excited voices asked if we had any left. They literally danced as they threw their credit cards at the cashier and ran out the door with the last two Iomega drives and floppies in the city. They said they had checked out every electronics store and Target/Walmart in town and nobody had them! I wonder if online sellers beat them to it, hoping to cash in on the sudden rarity of the drives.
Maybe they knew CD burners and flash memory were on the way to eventual mass adoption. Standardizing something that will go obsolete in 5 or so years doesn't seem like a good idea.
Heaven Piercing Man The problem is, none of those really have tje same function. Floppies and Zip disks were cheap disposable media that you bought en masse and served as rewritable media. USB keys are expensive and you usually only use 1-2 constantly like an external HDD and CD/DVD-R are not rewritable and the RW version comes with many issues. There is no true modern replacement for floppies or Zips.
Maybe... at least in my personal experience once everyone and their dog could buy a CD burner, they did, and everyone at work or school was using CDs to pass stuff around the same way they did with floppies, and you'd keep hearing about Nero this and Nero that. It didn't matter if they weren't rewritable, people got more. But that lasted like no more than 4 years until USB drives started getting introduced by retail stores as a bundle with printers and computers.
largol33t1 Apple actually sort of did it, there were a few '90s models (Quadra, or maybe G3) which came with a built-in Zip drive. It was a total lifesaver if you were doing audio recording or heavy graphics stuff. Just 5 years before that, I had an amazing 1GB HD in my (Atari-driven) studio; you could record, mix and produce a full album on that. But backing up all that on floppies? Forget it, you'd usually keep the final master and throw away the recording sessions .-D; *or* you'd get a DAT backup system, which is what I did eventually, and it was slow as a dead snail glued to the floor. A few PC-minded Mac users (those people always trying to squeeze the most out of the machine, and ending up wasting 90% of the time thinking about how to work faster and only 10% actually doing some work) started booting from Zip disks with different configurations, one for publishing - with a mountain of typefaces, one for music - with the bare minimum of extensions etc., which was cool in some way but actually didn't do anything a memory expansion wouldn't do. Ok, memory was 70$/MB so I can understand why some people would try to spare some XD When I "retired" the old Atari STs, I put ALL of the software, data, games, EVERYTHING I ever used and produced on those machines (apart form the actual audio) on a SINGLE Zip disk. These days, if I want to play around with the ST I just whip a disk in and all my old stuff is there. Much better than having to keep those Megafile hard disks running o_O
Thats a great idea except that 3.5inch 1.44mb floppy discs were older than the 100mb zip disc, and USB was not meant for data transfer until usb 2.0 with 1.0 and 1.1 it was meant to replace the PS/2 ports for keyboard and mouse even CD drives were older the main difference was of course cds were only writable once so you had to plan on making sure you really wanted to save what you were gonna, 1.44mb floppys were a worse format of course but they had such a standard and just were so ingrained into the hardware of 90s beige boxes that you needed one, that is until space requirements were made larger then cds just kinda took over until USb flash drives and portable usb hard disks were cheap enough for the masses, it also doesnt help that just like he described the click of death was a huge blow for iomega if i were HP or Dell would i want this drive that was almost guaranteed to kill itself, nah im gonna stick with the good ole 1.44 and 650 mb drives for getting data on and off my drives
I bought the SCSI version of this drive of off ebay when I was 12. I remember saving up for it, and was so excited when I was able to buy it. It drastically increased the storage capabilities of the Mac OS 6 I was relying on back then. Crazy how far we've come since then.
I just love your channel man, LGR and 8-bit guy are my favorite old tech channels. Is that the Sony ECMCS3 by the way? I planned to buy that mic and it sound really good.
It's been like 20+ years since I used one, but I think you're supposed to set the printer port in the BIOS to EPP mode only to get the fastest speed off the port. I never played games right from one. But I collected Mp3's, Photos, Mod files, downloaded software and a (then) bunch of Mame roms.
You are correct, I was able to adjust my reliable transfer speed from "2" to "10" by just adjusting the printer port in the BIOS. People who never bothered reading the 'readme' files included just screamed at the slow-ass transfer rate. Shades of the Fastload cartridges for the Commodore 64 that addressed the serial port bug that shipped with the 1541 drives. Those who never found out they should buy one were driven crazy by the 1541's pathetic default transfer rate. And this was pathetic by 1984 standards btw! Today even the slowest broadband connection transfers about 50x the data per second then would fit on a single C-64 floppy disc, and about 1000x the rate of read/write for that same disc on a vanilla 1541 drive.
I had a Fastload cartridge too. You can blame Jack Tramiel and the penny pinchers at Commodore's HQ for also forcing the C=64 and 1541 to use the Vic-20's 6 pin serial port that bogged down the transfer speed.
The Parallel version of the drive was always a bit janky but that's what you saw most on PCs. SCSI was a big of a luxury on most PC systems and always tricky to setup. The IDE versions were good but did not come to till later. Iomega even sold a zip (and later jazz) branded PC SCSI adapter.
Yes and no. The reason they switched to serial in the first place, is because the IEEE-488 Parallel cables were *very* expensive, and sometimes hard to get. Quality control was much more difficult back then, because the manufacturing techniques were less precise. So a lot of cables failed during testing, before even leaving the factory. But also: The MOS6522 VIA chip had a "shift register" that would be capable of serializing the parallel data rapidly and with little processor overhead. Unfortunately, a timing bug was discovered in the shift register. A framing error could occur when the clocks between the 6522 chips in the VIC-20 and the 1540 disk drive were not synchronized - this would cause the serial bus to lock up. Greg Berlin at Commodore had to change the serialparallel routines to be "bit-banged" by the 6502 processor instead - a slow, clumsy method, but it worked, and a stock VIC-20 only had 5k of RAM in the first place, so it wasn't a big deal. The C64 used the 6526 I/O chip, which had a fully functional shift register, and so the circuit board for the C64 was wired to take advantage of this. But then Murphy's Law raised its ugly head, and a minor rework of the board at the board manufacturers (to accommodate a screw hole!) discarded the high-speed wire - dooming the C64's serial bus to bit-banging once more. Worse still, the new VIC-II chip periodically interrupted the 6510 processor during disk drive communication, thus generating "jitter" into the timing. This meant that the serial bus was slowed down EVEN MORE to make it reliable again! As a result, we had to wait for the 1571, and the Commodore 128, which had "Burst Mode" and a fully working pair of 6526's. There were more reasons why it was slow, but this is a wall of text already... if you really want to know, just ask. :) Most speed loaders that didn't require hardware modifications, like the Fastload cartridge, worked by overriding the IEC serial protocol; for example, by sending the data two bits at a time. Since the clock line was not being used by the 6526 chip, they could send data down the clock *and* data line at the same time.
Ohhh! THESE!! I remember when these where first showing up here in Argentina. Thought they where the future. I was still a child, so I could not afford it. Plus, I think these had a prohibitive price tag as well. Silly import taxes...Anyway, thanks for the trip down the memory lane =)
Mi papá tuvo el extraible a principios de los 00s, eran muy buenos, llevaba 2 disquetes de esos y ni usabas el primero a 100%, ahorrabas mucho en disquetes floppy
Back when i'm in the middle school, using floppy disk, and there is one computer in the school lab using zip drive, me like "WOW 100 MEGS ! MY HARD DRIVE IN MY OWN COMPUTER IN MY HOME HAD LESS STORAGE SPACE" nowadays, we're laugh to 32 GB flash drive, only capable to store few movies, even few TB hard drive is full in the matter of months.
so true i remember when i was blown away at my computer having a 250 gb drive now my 1tb only has 200 g FREE in a little less than a year same as my 4g flash drive being considered so big and now my thumb drive is 64
We had to replace an entire classroom of zip drives more than once, as well as every disk because click of death was contagious. Bad disks would damage the drive, giving it COD, then and disk used in that drive would become damaged and would give COD to other drives it was tried to be used in. Eventually the cause of mass drive failures was figured out and new model drives and disks that were immune got installed. I liked that class. Before that, a high school "computer class" was basically just a modern rehash of the old typewriter classes, so you only learned the basics and the focus was on using word as of we were going to have to transcribed stuff former. (I middle school we did have computer class as well, but that was mostly typing and was on ancient Apple IIe's, but our teacher did get in to programming on them sometimes, which was amazing at the time.) The high school class with the zip drives was something all together an experiment here in combination with an English and history class. Unlike normal class assignments, every student in this program had the same 3 teachers for these classes, just at different times, in 3 rotations. Instead of being about lessons and doing single tasks, it more focused on projects and was more like professional work than normal school has been prior (at one point we ab multi month long project of actually running a business at the school which would be in competition against the other half of students in the program and sold some foodstuffs to students). The computer class severed both as a sort of dedicated lab period for working on projects of the other 2 classes (which themselves had overlap with each other), but also had it's own projects focused on using various software packages at the time like early Photoshop and basic 3D cad. This was why we needed zip disks, floppies were just to small and server based storage at the time was out of the program's budget. I have that program to thank/blame for my first job, which was working in the IT department of the school district. Not only were they the ones that flew the job opening in class senior year (was TA for comp class then), but apparently because I had been in that program, I, and another dude from another school (shoutout to Aubert for introducing me to happy hardcore and generally being a cool guy), were instant hires over the other random 10-12 random kids that applied. Ingesting times.
Wow, I still have my ZIP250 USB drive sitting on my basement and I thought that was old. Back in the day, I thought this held SO MUCH data. By the way, your Windows 95 PC seems really fast and snappy. Like a lot snappier than my crappy Windows 10 system.
Windows 10 has a lot of overhead. Think of how much spying M$ can do with a 20GB OS. Windows 95? About 50MB. I would really like to see OSes get back to being streamlined.
OS's? Hell programming in general, Everyone has fallen into the "Add More Code!"/"Patch it Later" Pits. I would love to see old code debugged and streamlined. Too many are programming for 'Top of the Line' just on the market systems. Too much bloatware.
spying needs you to connect and update more. It's Not more Memory in an OS, it is in the constant need to fix bugs and errors *.1, *.2, *.5 ect updating software.
Those things were a godsend when CD-R media still cost 20 bucks a pop, assuming you could afford the burner. I used to leave mine at the computer lab at school overnight, using the campus internet to download the latest Slackware Linux release. Then one sad day, Slackware grew past 100MB...
I have an internal Zip drive lying around in a box somewhere. Connected via IDE/ATA ribbon cable like a typical hard drive did, but showed in Windows 95 as a floppy. Which is fine unless you already had a B drive, in which case Win95 would get somewhat confused about things. This was fixed in 95B when the driver was changed to declare it a removable drive instead of a floppy. I also still have a Jaz 1GB SCSI model as well as the SCSI bus controller and cables. At the time, that was _the_ hot setup for fast removable bulk storage, and it remained a rare top-shelf type setup until flash memory basically ended the reason for basically every other form of removable media to exist. I ended up writing a pretty popular article on how to fix the Click of Death on Jaz drives (as their problem was a lack of lubrication on the drive head's guide rails, which caused them to bind), but that article's long since disappeared from the Internet and my searches haven't turned it up.
When you put in the "click of death" part in the video... that the part of the video that I was hoping to see. You really know your hardware! Have a great Sunday.
There's another guy you should check out called Vwestlife. He's not as vibrant as LGR or the other guys, but he's incredibly informative and finds more obscure stuff. I believe he's been seen hanging around all 3 channels at one point or another.
LSU had Zip drives installed in pretty much every computer lab computer back in the day. I used them ALL the time for assignments and other stuff when I was an undergrad in the late 90s and early 00s until flash drives came along. MAME ran pretty well off them, too.
Back in the nineties, I had an internal ZIP drive, and my brother had an external SCSI drive. He contacted me recently, hoping I could copy his thesis from an old disk. Unfortunately, both of us had given our drives away. Fortunately, the school he teaches at is so behind the times, that one of the departments still uses them! He was able to recover his data.
The first time I heard about and used zip drives/disks was in college. The computers in our college computer labs all had internal zip drives and the book store sold zip disks and had a few external drives you could buy for your own computer. I was always tempted to buy a drive for my computer at home, but the price was just too much. But yea, by my third year of college, a number of the zip drives died and I remember having to memorize what computers had working zip drives and which ones didn't, and hope a computer with a working zip drive was available. (In all fairness though, a number of floppy drives on some of the computers didn't work either.)
I have a music sampler I still use which reads samples directly from the Zip disk, so it's pretty damn fast. That's an internal drive using IDE though.
I may be weird, but I love looking at the bookshelves in the backs of all of LGR videos and seeing how many games, programs, whatever i can recognize. it's just as fun as learning and remembering all the old tech we used to live for as computer geeks.
I used to work in the graphics industry and these were essential before USB drives. Kept mountains of logos and art files and were quickly interchangeable.
Yep, same in the printing industry. Pretty much up until the mid 2000's, ZIP drives were common for graphic artists bringing in files, or for moving files to and from older systems that didn't have network capabilities, such as imagesetters. It wasn't until the late 2000's when USB drives finally came down in price that we were able to phase them out completely.
Of course, everything today is networked together, and everything external come from LFT off the internet. I think once in the last 3 years, a very old-school artist came in with files on a ZIP drive. Luckily, I still keep one around that works! 😆
I studied graphic design in 1999 and these were a life saver.
Yep, they replaced SyQuests pretty quickly.
Yes (working) drives where harmed during the marking of this episode...
Exactly, hardly forgotten.
I loved these things. Back in high school my friends and I would trade software on stacks of 15+ 3.5 formatted AOL floppies held together with rubber bands. Zip drives changed our lives.
Kind of like Pokemon cards except you felt cooler with those disks!
These were the best thing ever when I first started college in the late '90s (1997-99) when our Macs didn't have enough HDD space, and we were in graphics classes. We could store an entire semester's worth of projects on one or two of these bad boys and take them with us. They were virtually indestructible and made classes that much more fun when you walked in with your Zip disk and knew you were ready to go for the day. Good times.
Good times until the Click of Death and I lost a lot of projects. Ended up having to use two disks to save to; one as a backup
This bring back memories. I started art school in 1999, had a few of these in different colours for different things (can’t remember now, different projects? Different classes?). Those PowerMac G3 at school all had internal zip drive, and because those PowerMac G3 has its own translucent green case if you remember those, I’m sure they had it custom ordered from Apple as the zip drive has the official green translucent cover! I also end up bought that internal drive for reading them at home. I had forgotten about that internal drive until this video popped into my recommendation!
@@OutdoorsWithShawn until they got ruined by the same defective drive... You lucked out :)
@@OutdoorsWithShawn That’s why you should *always* backup, backcup and backup. :) Enough scare stories about people losing book manuscripts or master thesises due to the harddisk dying or the computer getting stolen.
@@cieludbjrg4706 this was before it was well known about the click of death. Once we knee more about it, we had back ups.
I'm still saving up for one to this very day
LOL
I got one at 18. Not sure how.
i found one in my garage
not sure how far your gonna get with purchasing it new at RSP
I hear that they’re going to replace 3.5 floppies 😊
Random aside: Those decade old Zip disks are still four times larger than the maximum size allowed for an email on Gmail (25MB). Email really hasn't kept up with the rest of technological evolution.
Grumbel Although the total free storage space has increased significantly. I seem to remember Hotmail only allowed 20MB email storage for your whole inbox unless you upgraded to a paid plan.
Democritus86 But that reasoning was made all the more redundant when those same providers launched their cloud storage services, and even give you the option to provide a sharing link to, for example, a OneDrive or Google Drive file, whilst composing an email.
Though I'd argue though that email shouldn't really be used for file transfer anyway. That's what things like FTP and WebDAV are meant for.
That's because of all the dingbats that insist on just leaving files attached to emails for some nebulous later date. I've watched email space be increased and decreased repeatedly over the last 20 years.
Email is not designed nor supposed to do that. HTML email is bad enough.
When I was in college, zip discs were a requirement. My college had made a deal with a computer company and there were zip drives in every college-owned computer. I got used to them in a hurry, and honestly, for quick data transfer, they were awesome. They didn't have the wait time of burning a CD, and USB was still pretty new back then, and unreliable. I loved my zip drives. My desktop had an internal. My mom's computer had a SCSI. What I loved about almost every single external zip drive was the eject button. Those things could shoot a disc across the room and hurt somebody. It was hilarious.
Damn I miss those times. I remember feeling so jealous when they first came out and a 3.5 1.2MB drive was the best drive I had. When I finally bought one I went crazy copying all sorts of programs, files, games, music. Then again WAV files were ridiculously large. Learned the hard way about the eject button when it shot out and spilled my soda can over me.
I had completely forgotten about the eject button!
@@VideoCesar07 Are you sure it was a 3.5" Floppy? The old 5 1/4" disks went up to 1.2 MB in high density mode. the 3.5's did 1.44MB in high density mode, and they did a 2.88MB drive in that size too, but I think it was expensive, and didn't gain traction.
I remember using programs back in the day to do custom formats to disks, which increased the capacity, and sometimes let you use a couple of extra tracks (80-82,83), and more sectors per track to squeeze more data in. It was drive and media dependent, but you could usually squeeze a little more data in. I think I got up to 1.5MB in some cases on 5 1/4 disks.
@@lesleymunro4964 I stand corrected. It's been sooooooo long. Your numbers are correct. When the 3.5s came out it was a great jump forward to the 2.88 capacity but still a bit hindered...until I discovered zip files and later on, the ability to split them into multiple smaller files. Crazy to think that today a multi-gig file can be shared via broadband when a 10MB file was considered large at the time.
Now I feel I missed out since I never got to use the custom formats.
I forgot the force those drives would eject with. They would spit clean out of the drive!
I still have one of these. My old RuneScape accounts and passwords are stored on one with some Slipknot songs. Good times.
click click click click
Rudofaux hahahah fr
I still have mine too! kept all the backups on these
Still got my ZIP 100 drive in a carrycase designed for the drive, powersupply, cable and 3 discs.
My parents have had one, lovingly stored in its original box in a closet for the last 20 years, that my Dad is still pissed off about buying and every now and then mentions like it's still a relevant technology. Case in point, last summer when I told them to get a 5TB USB drive to back up all of their machines. Dad asked why he couldn't use "that drive thing you made me buy" to do it...
Pretty much every time something better came along I have had to explain why it was no longer relevant. USB sticks, flash cards, CD-Rs, DVD-Rs, USB hard drives, BD-Rs, etc, etc... Dad is still holding on to the dream and still pissed about the $200 that only was viable for about 2 years.
Thanks for posting this great video and bringing back many memories. I was on the Zip Drive design committee and was the Technical Support Manager at Iomega at that time for 5 years. Previously I'd been a field sales engineer for 5 years with Iomega starting when they had the 8 inch 10Mb Bernoulli drives. My staff in Technical Support came up with the idea of having a window on the Zip drive. I had a pile of Zip and Bernoulli drives and disks that I kept for years. I posted them on Craig's List and got ZERO responses for anyone wanting to buy them. After a few weeks of posting with no results, I just threw them all in the trash. All of my Bernoulli and Zip data fit on one flash drive thus explaining why the technology became obsolete.
I never buy from Craig's List. They've earned a really bad reputation. If you couldn't sell 'em you could've donated them to a computer tech museum (like the one in Boston), Good Will or other thrift store, etc. Such a waste to throw out old tech like that.
@@SlowPCGaming1 Considering how much sh!t I saved on Iomega Zip disks in college, I have to agree with this. I don't know about Bernoulli, but had Rick Kaylor sold his surplus Zip disks and drives (if brand new) on eBay rather than craigslist, he would have made a bundle.
There are still many eBay listings for Zip disks and drives today, and while I couldn't care less about the 100 or 250 mb models, the harder to find 750 mb model is still useful, yet backwards compatible with the smaller capacity disks.
I was editor of my college newspaper, and delivered the finished product to the on-campus printing press via Zip disk. This TH-camr decided not to review Iomega Jaz drives, but the media on those could store 1 GB and 2 GB disks, and all the commercial art students swore by them. 💁🏻♂️💾 🏆
@@TuNnL I remember the Jaz drives. I used to use those at work at the time. 1 GB on a disk was like "wow", considering my computer at the time only had about 750 meg hard drive. Anybody remember the SyJet drives that SyQuest put out around the same time? Those held about 1.5 GB. I still have one and at least 2 disks (maybe three). I will have to dig that thing out and see if it still works.
I'm a former printer and I can say the reason manufacturers started using the folded manual format is because it is cheaper to just print and fold a piece of paper than to fold, trim, and staple (actually is stitching, not staples) the manual. They could end up saving up to 5 - 6 cents per manual and with the volume they needed, could end up saving tens of thousands of dollars in production.
Also I remember when zip disks were THE format companies and designers used when submitting their print projects, mainly for the storage capacity. It got to the point we had to put a return disk fee onto the disks so people could get them back.
As someone that works in the printing industry. I can confirm this
When I read "I'm a former printer" I wondered if your comment was a story about how you evolved into an all-in-one printer/scanner/fax/copier over time or something.
@Max William Lauf I can confirm this also, it was the format we used as the disk were cheaper to ship than other media at the time and it was quick (relatively) to get data onto and off them. We had a kid that would run the disks between the studio and print house all day long, just running disks back and fourth.
A former printer? What did you run out of ink? 😂😂😂
As a graphic design student in the early 2000s these were a regular staple. $30 for 3 disks as opposed to $30 for a 128 mb usb flash drive.
I seriously doubt my comment will be seen anymore, but the latest driver for the LPT ZIP drive includes a program called "Parallel Port Accelerator", that signficantly improves the LPT ZIP drive speeds on both reading and writing.
I would recommend checking that out.
MilanorTSW200 It just seems that it copied already but keeps copying in the backround
Replying to give this more weight with the algorithm
Thank you! Finally I can back up my porn with more regularity
@@MisterRorschach90 p sure that was a joke and u just got r/wooooshed
That software enabled full use of Bi-directional function on ports that supported the protocol, not all did.
FYI: There is a hole on the back that you can stick a paper clip in to eject the disk with no power- similar to the ones on the front of CD drives, but takes very little pressure.
I'm afraid to watch the video based on some of the corrections people are posting. Sad
The best part of owning a zip drive is finding it 20 years later, having it work, and enjoying the time warp back to the late 90's.
I'd feel bad for anyone who moved up from a Zip 100/250 to a 750 and discovering that their old 100 disks couldn't be read on it.
That was the shock of a lifetime when our company bought the first batch or 750MB drives. No one imagined they'd not be backwards compatible.
Then I found out that my backup that I placed on ZIP drive discs could not be read when I changed computers and the newer 750 drive.. 22 Paper weight discs.
I think that was a big cause of their downfall
@@romulusnr I think by the 750, it was already all over but the crying 😎
@@nucflashevent There was likely no way to save it at that point, but basic backwards compatibility would have given them a few more years of viability. In the long run, nothing much; but it expedited the demise.
My G4 Mac had a built-in Zip drive. I also had a SCSI for my PowerMac and a USB drive.
The worst part of the Click of Death was it would spread; If a disk got the CoD, it had to be destroyed. If the disk was put into a different drive, that drive would get the CoD. Any disk put in a CoD-affected drive would also get the CoD. It was the bubonic plague of floppy storage.
@EJ Taylor Which reminds me to play the Ezio Trilogy again. ;)
ｂｕｂｏｎｉｃ ｐｌａｇｕｅ
lolwut
13:31
That transition! I loved it!
I went to lean in closer to see better and the capture footage zoomed in my face.
Been a while since I've been pleasantly startled. =D
Yeah that was pretty neat.
Was epic! Top work Clint!
It was so seamless that I didn't even notice it haha
I thought that was pretty slick myself! Immediately scrolled down into the comments when I saw that lol.
When my computer crashed the 3.5 years of business data entry restored from my Zip Drive was worth having it back in the day.
Just A Man Yesbody a Bernie Bro company
My Zip drive would have been worth having if the backup disk hadn't somehow corrupted itself almost instantly, in safe storage & with almost zero use lol
@@MegaZeta I backed up after every time I finished entering data on a daily basis. I backing it up twice on two different discs. I also replaced the discs after a year of use. Never had one fail. Ironically, my first flash drive took a lot of personal data with it when it decided it was no longer formatted on the short side of being a year old. It was "solid state" I thought all these original single copies will be safe. Bad idea.🤦♂️
There were other backup options, it wasnt the zip drive that saved your data, it was the backup media.
@@pflaffik If it was on a Zip Drive, then in fact it's the Zip Drive that held the data. The fact is I restored my data from a Zip Drive. The fact of how you're backing up data has nothing to do with the fact it is important to back up data. The reality is a Zip Drive served me well. Thanks for your circular logic that serves no one for anything.
USB killed the Zip Disk Star.
Thanks for combining 2 things from my childhood into a single comment
And cheaper writeble CD's
Somethings are best kept off cloud. USB won't go away. Atleast I hope not.
Not really, USB and plug-n-play made the Zip drive better. Mostly made obsolete by cheaper & more reliable CD-R, larger & cheaper hard disks, and increasing use of networking/internet/e-mail for file transfer. Flash memory sticks were more the last nail in the coffin. When these first came out they were really a godsend.
Definitely wasn’t USB that killed it. It made it way better.
The zip drive came out just as I was starting art/design college. I used them all the way through college until they went obsolete. At the time they were the only viable option for carrying around and copying large-ish graphics files. Much more handy than burning a CD.
Ion-SHIVs Yes change to browse picture
I didn't see that the video was 20+ minutes long, and I ended up watching it all without even realizing it.
Good content.
BvousBrainSystems haha same
I got involved with Iomega in their Bernoulli Box days. I wrote and sold a driver for the Bernoulli Box for the QNX operating system, now owned by BlackBerry. When the Zip 100 come along I wrote drivers for both the SCSI and Parallel Port versions. The Parallel Port version was just a Parallel Port interface in front of SCSI. They were a really good technology at the time.
I loved my Parallel Zip drive! I had a little case and would ride my bike to friends places and copy games. 100 MB was quite substantial back on those days and the parallel interface was super easy to use.
PhilsComputerLab I
SCSI for the win (of the original two models). Several friends and I all bought Zip drives when they first came out, but for some reason they got the parallel ones... one buddy quickly realized his mistake and swapped it for the SCSI version while the store still would let him.
The difference between the two models, especially back, then was truly astonishing.
The parallel port one behaved as an awesome tape backup drive should have (without all of the whirring noises, rewinding and tensioning the tape, etc lmao those things sucked so much) but was too slow to use as a hard disk.
The SCSI one was a baby hard disk. I spent most of my time on Sun Unix and Dos/Windoze back then, but quite a bit on Mac too doing scanning work and similar. All of those PowerPC Macs they had on campus at the time were running a few OS versions behind the current, and also had Extensions up the wazoo loading on boot.
The neat thing was they all had a SCSI port on the back, so I could just plug in. They even had a few Zip drives in the lab too, but I had my own so that lived in a little carrying case with room for my important dozen or so disks, the brick and the SCSI cord. So I set up a few Zip disks as Mac-boot drives; you just reboot the Mac and hold down a funny four button combo and it forced the machine to boot from external SCSI devices... so I would be sitting there in the lab running the most up to date OS version with only the extensions I needed loaded - using RamDoubler and all sorts of fun tools - and still had access to the Lab server so I could use PhotoShop and the other toys; I could mount my Aufs volume (data stored on my unix account) too for fun and games.
Let me also say... Marathon came out around then ^^ muhahaha. Zip disk (SCSI) was amazing.
But hey, even the slow parallel port one was pretty sweet!
Don't copy that floppy! 😋
Back when piracy was really fucking easy. Good times.
I used to work in a support center in the late 90's for HP and Zip drives. The fail rate was very high for them and the usual trouble call WAS the "click of death"
How dare you click. HOW DARE YOU!
Is exact problems with the hard drives a click of death is a big trouble
The drives were not very reliable, but the disks actually were - compared to floppy disks.
They had a class action lawsuit over the click of death
10,000 Iomega Zip Drives vs 20 T-Rexes please
OzTalksHW Did not know you like retro tech! hi!
I love retro tech :) I've done some older hardware on my channel previously. Lazy Game Reviews is pretty specatacular!
Aye :D Nice seeing you here. LGR is such an incredible channel hey? Such a cool dude :p
Dingleberry Tech Another tech youtuber I'm subscribed too... Is this a meet up?
Aha aye, that's awesome :D Small world on TH-cam apparently :p
These were so necessary as an artist. We used them until the early 2ks.
Kids today don't understand the joy of storing Quake 2 on 80 floppy disks.
Kids today will never know the fun of installing an entire operating system from floppies.
@Dave Shaffer Worst Walkman mixtape ever.
Kids today don't understand the pain of installing Windows 10 on 2,778 floppy disks.
Or unzipping Starcraft from 65 floppies, reaching disk #36 and getting crc error.
Hours wasted.
And i thought it was bad when i got gta on 7 dvds. Took me like 4 hours with a usb2 dvd drive
Eventually all technology becomes obsolete. Someday TH-cam will be obsolete. While buying 100mb storage today will sound stupid, back when these things were popular 100mb was super-duper-huge, when compared to the 1.44mb floppy.
I mean, the CD-R existed, and they had a 700 MB storage space, so...
@@karfsma778 Those were write once media. During the peak of the 100mb's popularity, CD-RW drives were expensive and kinda rare. They were also a lot slower than zip drives.
Oh please, TH-cam has been obsolete since it was purchased by Google.
@@dr.insaneoiv You know that you're watching this _on_ TH-cam, right? That it is still, by a _huge_ margin, the most popular vidoe site on the Internet, right?
It will become obsolete, and it is likely already headed that way now (spurred in no small part by poor decisions and advertisers-first business strategies from TH-cam management and Google above them), but it is far from obsolete now.
I was so proud of my zip drive at the time. Used it to download roms for neogeo at the university.
Not only was the click of death awful, but it was contagious. A ZIP disk that went through a bad drive could, and often did, break the replacement drive. I saw it all the time when working support for a company that used them in their stores for backup.
Ouch.
Having worked in the same field at the same time, I suspect that many of the "contagious" damage was thanks to people attempting to repair their cod disks. Broken hinges, stuff shoved into the case to "clean" the heads, the myth that you could fix it with a sharp rap against the edge of the table... Of course, they never would admit it, but we knew, we knew...
I literally just encountered the click of death and bad disk killing zip drives problem this past week!
I had used zip disks to backup my high school files in the mid 90s. I recently found the disks again but didn't have the drive. So I bought a used zip drive usb. I was able to recover one disk, but then it couldn't read one of the other disks. Strangely, I found that the same drive suddenly couldn't re-read the first disk it had successfully read. So I thought the used zip drive had suddenly crapped out.
So then I decided to go on eBay and buy a new in box zip 100 usb drive. The good disk read no problem. Once i got to the second disk however, the drive couldn't read it, and then failed to read the good disk also.
There was an obvious clicking noise coming from both the used and new drives. A Google search later, I discovered the click of death and bad disks killing good drives issue which I hadn't known about. So I had just wasted two good zip drives just trying to recover my high school data with no success. Argh!
Anyway, awesome episode of LGR Oddware as usual, Clint!
@@anobservr I wonder if data recovery services could save your data to a hard drive or USB Flash Drive?
I remember having a love/hate relationship with Zip drives. When they worked, I thought they were great, when they failed (usually the external parallel drives) it was pretty aggravating especially considering the data loss. The internal drives were much more reliable (at least for me).
It's so irritating that Apple never included anything higher than 100 mb in their internal Zip drives, though. Had the PowerMacs offered that, I might have had a reason to buy it rather than a MacBook Pro, which died on me after just seven and a half years.
In the post-pandemic era, I'm at the point where a 2010-12 Mac Pro desktop actually makes more sense from a value standpoint than buying a whole new MacBook Pro. Other than 100 mb and 250 mb, I couldn't find any NIB internal Iomega internal drives online, so if I get one for nostalgia it will have to be external. 💁🏻♂️💾
5 sec turned several minutes...
no wonder the 90's seemed to last forever.
Just picked up a USB ZIP drive. Excited to try my old Zip disks from college.
I would do that by myself, just to be safe
hopefully the disks won't self-destruct
Curious to know how this worked out. My experience with Zip drives, albeit as a very early adopter, was that the disks constantly corrupted themselves via cosmic rays or something, meaning, while in safe storage with little use
@@MegaZeta LOL Very true. I completely forgot about this. Never did find any of my old disks.
When I was in middle school, teachers worshipped these things.
It was cool hardware, i would have killed for one of those, but i was too young and no way my parents will spend 200 + bucks on that thing.
We love you CS!
Why in the fuck is cs188 here?
I should imagine they _were_ a godsend with the amount of data teachers have to move around
Never knew that cs watched LGR. I guess now it's canon!?
I swear, this channel is totally getting me through this quarantine! I've never enjoyed working from home (too many distractions) but this channel helps. A LOT! I have a thing for vintage 3D software so anything 3D is awesome! FYI - I had the carry case for my Zip drive. You bet your ass I felt like like a gangsta!
When Zip Disks first came out they were ground breaking.... Nothing else was available that could move that amount of data that quickly or easily. Because the drive was portable and easy to setup on PC or MAC it wasn't a limitation that the other computer didn't have the drive. Even in the early days or CDR these were still easier to use... Early PC CDR was very hit and miss in terms of compatibility between various media and drives... Plus CDR was slow!
Hit and miss is RIGHT! I remember when we got our first cd burner; my brother was copying pictures for a friend, and when I walked in the room he winced a little, "Don't stomp around so much, I'm burning a disk."
Yup! I remember making a lot of coasters when burners first came out. Using a burner in college, the blanks (in the college book store) were 14.99 each. I remember, because I also remember writing the disk in 2x, and thinking "good god.. can it go that fast without making another coaster?! 15 freaking bucks here!"
Dont mean to be a grammar nazi but it is disc not disk.
Astro Gamer to the Rescue! Thank you so much! When I typed the comment i thought to myself "Crap, is it disc or disk? Whatever, I got a 50/50 shot and if it's wrong I'm sure someone will call me out on it"
Yeah disc means cd and dvd while disk means floppy disk and hard disk.
I always felt like in a alternate universe, Nintendo would have reached out to Iomega to make Zip Disks the format for the N64 back in 1996. Even at 100MB it would have been a substantial step up from those original carts (which on average were only 8MB).
that would have been neat in a way it happened with the 64DD although that was a different technology manufacturer and bombed like crazy
the point is the games didn't need more than 8MB. And have you seen the state of some of the cartridges? kids dont look after their stuff, i trade a few games and sometimes they were scuffed up and dirty, a zipdisk wouldn't be able to put up with the abuse.the metal cover would be destroyed in a week of buying.
@@Professional_TH-cam_Commenter They lost the Final fantasy series because they kept the 8 mb cartridge. It wasn't the only one, From what I could understand.
''You know things are bad when your hot HD disc drive, Red Ring of Death is being compared to the Click of Death''
@@SImrobert2001 "you kids got that final fantasy on zip drive?"
I had the internal IDE version and loved it. I remember they were priced much less than the parallel port version and, as you discovered, were Windows plug’n’play devices.
I remember the click of death on every one of these I saw... "Also used in aircraft navigation systems"... we are all gonna die!
Maybe just be very late, or cause an international incident.
I have two 100mb scsi zips for my classic macs and not a single click of death
OMG I was actually on the r&d team on designing the zip and jazz drives. Here was the thing. iOmega came to our marketing class and asked out to come up with a design. The iOmega office was only like 2 miles from the high school. The high school had college classes from Weber University as electives for Roy High School. I was just lucky enough to be taking many college credit classes and was included in the team. Oh memories.
Interesting. I remember reading that Fitch did a lot of design work for iomega, but I couldn't find much more info about it.
FuYing Bro well it was crap all of ours and friends broke ripp off
Shadow Heart oh I am sure it was. I mean yea I was a programmer at the time and was making my own games, and I was also taking engineering work with cad, but they came to our marketing class to figure out a case design. I mean who the hell does that. They were not the only company. Coke came to us on testing their new plastic bottle design. And some other company came to us for repurposing and building block design that was found to be a major chocking hazard. We were in marketing, not design. It was insanity.
I would personally like to thank you from the bottom of my heart for helping bring this into the world. Without you I might have had to store my early internet downloaded porn on thousands of floppy disks! But thanks to you 3 years worth of porn fit on 1 disk! Because back then there was literally only 100 megs of porn online! lol
Phoenixesper1 all I did was help with with what the end product would look like
Can you assemble a machine largely out of oddware components?
Y'know, I bet I could. Now that could be fun.
+Lazy Game Reviews Please do it Clint ;]
Haha! I wonder what would be worse, its looks or its performance?
Lazy Game Reviews I'd love to see a video of such a Franken-PC!
An eMachines pc would be appropriate for the job
I had an internal Zip drive installed on my computer in the late 90's. I thought these things were great. I couldn't believe they had not overtaken floppy discs. I never had any problem with the drive or any Zip Disk's I bought. Thanks for the memories.
Same here, used it for backups until a 100 count cake box of CD-Rs dropped to $20 and the burners were stable at 40x speed...then the ZIP disks were bye bye. But glad to see you showing the Akai MPC-3000 which had SCSI on it to expand sample storage and off load sequences.
i found this difficult to watch because he kept speaking in a derisive tone about zip disks, sort of like they were a useless fad or something
Bought a Mac G4 (Sawtooth) with the internal Zip drive pre-installed from Apple (probably 2000). At some point I should really make a point of checking out what files I stored on those disks.
I used to have a ton of 100 and 250mb zip disks and eventually most of them stopped being able to be read by both the built-in and the external zip drive i had. not sure if all the disks failed or both drives failed, but there were certainly some quality issues.
Same. Our family Compaq Presario computer had an internal zip drive. Each member of the family had their own zip100 disk to put whatever he wanted on it. That was a lot of storage space in 1998!
I love this video. I was an original Iomega tech support rep during the ""Click of Death" time period. Such fun!!
Takes me back to the early days of Napster, when I used my Zip Drive to download all the music I could want exploiting the faster internet connection of the high school technology lab.
i was in art school when zip drive came out, it was like a miracle. we all thought it was the future and 2 years later it was gone
lol same|! I was in animation school and we used them during my degree (4 years) but right after I graduated, the school had dropped them
I went to F. I. T. for illustration, i thought i was going to become a comic artist. i dropped out after a teacher stole my friends assignment for an ad campaign. shortly after another friend who "Made it" confided in me after her gallery showing in Manhattan that she just wanted to marry someone and buy curtains and salad bowls all day ... heartbroken i became a manager at a hardware store and now I'm a stay at home dad. wahmp wahmp but i wouldn't change a thing
Pretty much the same here. The local university (which I later attended) installed them in 1996 and I used to cruise over there to download warez out of my T3 shell account and take them back home. When I started attending that school in 1999 most of the labs had discontinued them and by 2000 they were flat out gone entirely. Weirdly enough, floppy disks remained supported through the rest of my degree program, which I completed in 2006.
+WritersOnTheWall That teacher is shady as fuck. Damn... some people really don't have shame.
Yes making a good living out of freelance illustration is extremely though, not many people make it and it's not for everyone either
Lol, same as the rest here! We were all required to have zip disks for our art class photoshop projects back in the late 90s.. I liked them for what they did back then.
I had one of these back in the day - the parallel port version too. Although it was slow, it was way way faster than using PKZIP and PKUNZIP to span something large over multiple 1.44MB floppy disks. I loved that zip drive.
I remember always wanting such an Iomega ZIP drive when I saw it in the stores. I used to back up stuff onto 3.5" floppies and then years later burning them onto CDs, but that CD burner was veeeery expensive in the year 2000 :D.
18:21 when you use the google website stopwatch instead of the built-in one of your clock :D
I kept my games and porn on ZIP disks when I was 13. Good times, it was as large as the HDD on my computer, so it was like having a whole other computer for myself.
When I was in community college, I edited the school newspaper and operated out of a "student media group." We oddly had a position called "systems administrator" as in the mid to late 1990s, there were apparently still a shocking number of computer illiterate students (including the editor-in-chief I replaced).
That systems admin guy apparently was used to this idea, and had been hoarding zip disks to store all of his porn collection. Me and Cynthia, my photographer were an ambitious team burning through these disks fast, and when we started running low, we ransacked the place looking for the surplus.
Low and behold, we found stacks of unlabeled disks. And when we tested them out, they all had folders named "A," "B," "C," and all the way down the alphabet.
The letters represented all porn images and videos which had names beginning with "A," or "B" or "C," etc. Needless to say, there were only just over a dozen Zip disks, but we later found out the guy had the rest of them at home for "evaluation purposes." 👏🍆 💦
@@TuNnL Based.
You could have made some dough selling disks in school!
I had a portable zip drive when I was in University, it was great for making "backup" copies of games for all my friends.....those were the days.....
The videos you make are a true inspiration Clint. I hope you will stay on this platform as much as posible! Oh, and hello from Romania!
I'm an archivist for a museum, and I've got to digitize some zip disks 😅 your video is super helpful and informative, thank you 6 years on 🙇
"I found this at Goodwill like this."
I'm jealous of your second-hand stores. Ours suck. XD
What a bummer. I liked going in and seeing some old stereos and keyboards and monitors and such. :(
I thought one of my local thrift outlets was lame till one day it got stocked with LOADS of electronics, like they were spilling into the floor. Never saw so many LCD monitors there, but they were not something I need at the time
They just downed the electrics isle at my local one by a lot and replaced it with blanket and sheets isle.
I saw a Mac G4 tower at a second hand story one time. They were selling it for one hundred dollars I was tempted.
I recently moved and my parents were deciding on two homes and my dad made the final choice on the one im in now simply because it's goodwill had better stuff. He figured that the niceness of the things that are donated show how good the neighborhood is
Can I send you my old Zip disk...and have you pull off all the ....um....pictures and videos....I used to watch? ;)
makes sense that youre here. im subbed to your channel too
Hmm, I kinda want those 90's porn videos.
GLaDOS: Your Zip Drive has been received, analyzed, and promptly disposed of into an incinerator. Have a nice day.
You could put a password to protect those "cough - cough" sensible disks .... you did know that right ?
Bahahahaha
Honestly the whole zip drive and .zip format confused me a little when I was like 10 years old.
Figuring out the decompressing thing was a task..
I remember these well - started with a parallel PC one, upgraded to the transparent blue USB version and then moved on. I remember working in my first design studio that had an ‘internal’ Zip drive fitted in a Mac - it was even colour coded to the Mac (cream) instead of a floppy drive - felt like the future!
Remember the funky colour disks too - good times (until the click of death!)
I still own one! Loved it back in the day. I totally forgot about it. What I loved most, aside from the capacity was that it felt very durable
That zoom into screen effect is so cool
I remember when my dad hooked one of these up and clicked eject the first time. Boom headshot!
Jake Brake I remember in my art school, there was that one zip drive that eject harder than normal, not only the disk would got shot out some distance, the recoil so strong the whole drive itself knocked backward an inch!
Lok Cheung that is so awesome! Never had a Zip drive that did it that hard. There was one that would “fully” eject a disc if it was vertical.
I remember when these came out, and they were extremely useful. Hard drive space was precious and expensive to upgrade, and moving data from your computer to a friend's computer was extremely difficult without some sort of larger media, not to mention for small businesses and home users to do backups with (these were supported in most all programs at the time). There was also a large difference in running on your parallel port depending on how you had your port set (SPP vs EPP and ECP modes). The 750MB drive could read and write 250MB and 750MB disks, but could only read the 100MB disks (if I'm remembering correctly).
I love the nostalgic tech ware. Reminds me of being in college. Good times. How times have changed.
12:26
Notice the red switch of death ie. the PSU voltage selector. Some wiseass guys periodically switched those at school and *kaboom*, one dead PSU and rig achieved :D
The Iomega products were a bit rare in Europe. I remember only seeing a couple of times those 250Mb disks in the 2000 or earlier. But soon CD-R and RW took over permanently and after that came USB memory sticks. Oh those were the days... burning one 650Mb disk took something like one hour or so 20 years ago. We were pretty patient back then!
Do you think you could make a video showing how to properly maintain an older disk drive? I have some 5¼-inch and newer floppy drives and I'd like to make sure they last as long as possible.
that would be really interesting and useful.
+Zes
Although it's probably not what you want, but you might wanna buy a cheap (10 bucks or so) USB-floppy drive and use a floppy imager (eg WinImage or Floppy Image) to create 1.44 mb images from every floppy. So you have a bit-perfect backup up of your stuff that you can eg burn to DVD. The images are portable and can be read independent of any hardware, just in case your hardware breaks down.
Have you seen a USB 5¼-inch drive anywhere, because I sure haven't. Also this is hardly going to help with my 1986 DOS computer. Also I'm pretty sure you can't make copies of Amiga disks with a regular USB disk drive because Amiga formatted disks are weird and don't work with PCs, like, at all.
I'd like to see him make a video where he talks properly but that wood reeqire hin to be sober
and stop commuting sodomy with the soldering iron.
.
These things were an absolute godsend in the early days of DTP where Mac and Quark and Aldus owned the entire industry. The SCSI zip drive was pretty fast for external media (All Macs of that era had SCSI) in it's day and 100 megs meant you could fit your entire publication (and source art/images) on one piece of media.
This was before CD-R was available, before high speed internet, and when the most common way of schlepping files around was 1.44 meg floppies.
The zip drive was widely available (You could run down to any office or computer store and pick up drives or media), reasonably priced, and for a time you could see those blue boxes in EVERY office alongside the rainbow apple.
I stumbled across a box full of drives and media at the office the other day. Gave me a huge nostalgia buzz.
Would love to see LS120 episode in the future.. Make sure to get a motherboard from the pentium era that has explicit LS120 support in the bios. :)
porklaser What, you mean unlike the days of Aldus on a Mac SE where you did page layout, printed out all the pieces on 8.5x11, glued them together, proofread from that/sent that along with the file for printing, and hoped it came out alright? And let's not forget the printed photos that had to be paper clipped to the pages with the xerox copies of them pasted (that were cropped with post-it notes and enlarged/reduced using the photocopier) where they were supposed to go on the page.
This is how my high school did page layout and what our printer (local newspaper) received from us until 1999. That was the year we received all new Windows 95 machines, a scanner, and internet access in a lab. I immediately pitched the idea of using publisher (included in the OMG copy of office we had) to do the paper, self scan (and crop, correct, etc) photos, and send out a finished file for printing.
We won awards on both methods.
In the case of the SCSI Zip drive for mac: there was some software that you could install but you could use the disks without it provided you had the disk inserted before you turned the computer on.
If you were around in those bleeding edge early days you had to be using SyQuest scsi 5.25" drives. and be grateful for 44Mb / disk.
I always see German words popping up with native English speakers recently. Whats the influx? We've been using English words for 30 years in everyday life.
good to see I'm not totally insane for thinking these were a big mac thing. obviously the IBM world had em too but it seemed like these things were required for mac users for a stretch.
I had a SCSI one. Real fun installing the SCSI card too
Yeah me too, I buyed scsi card specially for the Zip drive hoping it would be faster and better, idiot of me spending more money to throw it to the trash years later having given so little use
SCSI was this strange, pro technology that was too good for the likes of us meagre IDE users.
@@FatNorthernBigot - SCSI (at the peak, I had two SCSI adapters in the one CBM A2000 060) enabled me to run some 4-to-6 HDDs, plus a SCSI H.P. Scanjet 4c. I usually had either a tower case for the extra drives, or an old Honeywell-Bull 386 case, with the HD access lamps made visible by drilling small holes through the case front panel, and pushing in plastic bezels. Each drive required setting a separate ID Address by jumpers.
The SCSI version of these are still in demand for the Synthesizer/Sampler market. The Akai MPCs use them for storage of samples without need to swap floppies.
Early 1990s we were using the Syquest EZ drives in our Graphic Design classes because it held 135MB. Then the Zip drive was getting popular due to cost and some of the Mac G4 could be bought with a built-in drive. Every store was carrying the Zip cartridges and the EZ was harder to find. I still have several stacks of Zip 100 and EZ135 cartridges hanging around at home.
I had a Zip drive connected to my family's Mac Performa 637CD when I was a kid. Because it was one of the last of the 680x0 machines, the few games commercially released after that were all geared to require the PowerPC architecture that was being pushed at the time. "Congrats on your new computer, it will never run any new software again!"
As a result of that (and the quite limited number of Mac game developers and port specialists), most of the games I played were shareware. Stuff like Ambrosia's lineup, or Realmz, or the Exile games would all fit nicely on a Zip disk (I had 3 disks all to myself, what luxury!). Even with the external SCSI interface it was just fine running these sorts of games.
It was mandatory to use these when i was in college lol they had a vending machine with the zip disks (back in 00-03)
I'm glad you mentioned music sequencers!! I remember Zip disk from my father using them for digital music creation back in the 90s
18:01 Did Clint said "Meeseekes"? Well, I gues that would work, as long as you don't need to get two points off of your game
That depends a bit on which Jerry you use.
I went with Garcia.
09yulstube Siërra
Upgrade op USB stick 32 gb
I totally Use to have 4 of these. Over time they have been miss placed or lost but I remember using them. always liked them.
Ahhh you are so thorough. I was wondering if you were going to being up .zip vs ZIP, and you went a step further and name dropped the person who designed .zip. Bravo. 👏🏻
Click-click-click-click-click* Ohshit
Colonel Graff yep. Been there.
Colonel Graff. The click of death just before it stopped working.
lol I recognize this sound
Wait that's just my hard drive
Oh shit, I remember that
My first laptop was a 486/sx25 with four whopping megs of ram and a 120Mb hard drive. That parallel zip drive was a godsend, albeit still bloody slow.
Those were almost the same exact stats as my first system. 100MB HDD. How things have changed.
AMD 486/DX40 but was my 1st Computer.(Desktop) 40Mb Hd, had thought Zip would become the Std, it had more than one maker.
I want to buy some of these things, and install ms-dos on it.
the success on zip was not just about its price point, the overall user experience was really great. Think about inserting the zip disk to the slot, the snap feels and the access sound was somewhat cool.
"Its newness has worn off over the years" The brutal yet inevitable entropy of the universe
You are my kind of a person
❤
I remember drooling over a 750mb zip disk in my old pc hardware shop, back when my 95 pc had a 500 mb harddrive. I wished I could store so much more stuff. (ie: Boobs)
heh, heh. Reminds me, around 2004 I was at Wal-mart buying a 500 gig external hard drive and a new 500 gig internal hard drive and the kid working the cash register was clearly from some deep African country and he was amazed at how much storage was suddenly available (well, so was I) so cheaply and he says to me, "Why you need so much space?" and I looked right at him and said (duh) "Porn!" and for a second he looked at me in shock and then threw his head back and began laughing and I thought it was funny because he was probably brought to America by some Christian church and maybe he actually thought I was kidding...
Ha, I guess I was lucky, porn has never aroused me (just seemed too artificial and aggressive), so I had no reason to fill my precious megabytes with that stuff.
Check out amateur porn.
Have tried, it just does not work when I know that they are doing that for each other and not for me nor with me; and the fact that they are doing it for others to watch causes even some repulsion.
I get reaction only when a girl looks into my eyes and clearly shows that she wants me and nobody else, and only when I know that she really means it and is not saying it just out of habit. Also, typical "sexy looks" do not work on me; I enjoy petite, quiet and simple looking girls who definitely are far from top-models. I guess, I'm demisexual :D But that's total off-topic here :D
They actually went up to 1GB sizes back when Zip Disks (brand name) were only hitting 256mb, I use to have eight of the 1GB disks which was hilarious because at the time was more than my 4GB Hard drive at the time which was one of the biggest in 1997
I don't get the quote: "3 Drives in One" which are...?
It states it on the box:
1. Expand the size of your internal hard drive
2. Take it with you, makes your files portable
3. Back up your hard drive
It’s a weak attempt to make it more appealing through advertising ;)
LOL, yeah that list doesn't make a lot of sense, they are more like functions, not 3 distinct types of drives. Crazy 90s adverts, but it worked, I had mine!
They were most likely 3 times faster and could store three times more.
Pasta Sarmonella E-Specialé if 100mb are 3 times 1.44mb, then yes
You kids ha ha, its crazy though this was what 16 years ago if anything. It's crazy how fast we have advanced in such a small amount of time.
What made me sad was the computer industry refusing to standardize these to replace the now useless 1.44 MB floppy. I kept waiting and waiting. The price on the drives sold in my store plunged from $199 to $49. I was sure that this meant my next computer would have one as standard equipment. Sadly, it never happened. Why they never did is something I don't understand. That's like the computer industry refusing to make USB ports standard on their computers and instead insisting on sticking with parallel connectors.
However, the customers noticed this big time. Two guys on separate occasions, ran into the store and in VERY excited voices asked if we had any left. They literally danced as they threw their credit cards at the cashier and ran out the door with the last two Iomega drives and floppies in the city. They said they had checked out every electronics store and Target/Walmart in town and nobody had them! I wonder if online sellers beat them to it, hoping to cash in on the sudden rarity of the drives.
Maybe they knew CD burners and flash memory were on the way to eventual mass adoption. Standardizing something that will go obsolete in 5 or so years doesn't seem like a good idea.
Heaven Piercing Man The problem is, none of those really have tje same function. Floppies and Zip disks were cheap disposable media that you bought en masse and served as rewritable media. USB keys are expensive and you usually only use 1-2 constantly like an external HDD and CD/DVD-R are not rewritable and the RW version comes with many issues. There is no true modern replacement for floppies or Zips.
Maybe... at least in my personal experience once everyone and their dog could buy a CD burner, they did, and everyone at work or school was using CDs to pass stuff around the same way they did with floppies, and you'd keep hearing about Nero this and Nero that. It didn't matter if they weren't rewritable, people got more. But that lasted like no more than 4 years until USB drives started getting introduced by retail stores as a bundle with printers and computers.
largol33t1
Apple actually sort of did it, there were a few '90s models (Quadra, or maybe G3) which came with a built-in Zip drive. It was a total lifesaver if you were doing audio recording or heavy graphics stuff. Just 5 years before that, I had an amazing 1GB HD in my (Atari-driven) studio; you could record, mix and produce a full album on that. But backing up all that on floppies? Forget it, you'd usually keep the final master and throw away the recording sessions .-D; *or* you'd get a DAT backup system, which is what I did eventually, and it was slow as a dead snail glued to the floor.
A few PC-minded Mac users (those people always trying to squeeze the most out of the machine, and ending up wasting 90% of the time thinking about how to work faster and only 10% actually doing some work) started booting from Zip disks with different configurations, one for publishing - with a mountain of typefaces, one for music - with the bare minimum of extensions etc., which was cool in some way but actually didn't do anything a memory expansion wouldn't do. Ok, memory was 70$/MB so I can understand why some people would try to spare some XD
When I "retired" the old Atari STs, I put ALL of the software, data, games, EVERYTHING I ever used and produced on those machines (apart form the actual audio) on a SINGLE Zip disk. These days, if I want to play around with the ST I just whip a disk in and all my old stuff is there. Much better than having to keep those Megafile hard disks running o_O
Thats a great idea except that 3.5inch 1.44mb floppy discs were older than the 100mb zip disc, and USB was not meant for data transfer until usb 2.0 with 1.0 and 1.1 it was meant to replace the PS/2 ports for keyboard and mouse even CD drives were older the main difference was of course cds were only writable once so you had to plan on making sure you really wanted to save what you were gonna, 1.44mb floppys were a worse format of course but they had such a standard and just were so ingrained into the hardware of 90s beige boxes that you needed one, that is until space requirements were made larger then cds just kinda took over until USb flash drives and portable usb hard disks were cheap enough for the masses, it also doesnt help that just like he described the click of death was a huge blow for iomega if i were HP or Dell would i want this drive that was almost guaranteed to kill itself, nah im gonna stick with the good ole 1.44 and 650 mb drives for getting data on and off my drives
I bought the SCSI version of this drive of off ebay when I was 12. I remember saving up for it, and was so excited when I was able to buy it. It drastically increased the storage capabilities of the Mac OS 6 I was relying on back then. Crazy how far we've come since then.
I worked in publishing in 1999 - everyone had a zip drive attached to their Mac G3s - I kinda miss the colours
I just love your channel man, LGR and 8-bit guy are my favorite old tech channels. Is that the Sony ECMCS3 by the way? I planned to buy that mic and it sound really good.
Thanks! And yep, I believe that's the mic. I've used it for a couple years now (usually off-camera) and it's pretty good for the price.
It's been like 20+ years since I used one, but I think you're supposed to set the printer port in the BIOS to EPP mode only to get the fastest speed off the port. I never played games right from one. But I collected Mp3's, Photos, Mod files, downloaded software and a (then) bunch of Mame roms.
You are correct, I was able to adjust my reliable transfer speed from "2" to "10" by just adjusting the printer port in the BIOS. People who never bothered reading the 'readme' files included just screamed at the slow-ass transfer rate.
Shades of the Fastload cartridges for the Commodore 64 that addressed the serial port bug that shipped with the 1541 drives. Those who never found out they should buy one were driven crazy by the 1541's pathetic default transfer rate. And this was pathetic by 1984 standards btw! Today even the slowest broadband connection transfers about 50x the data per second then would fit on a single C-64 floppy disc, and about 1000x the rate of read/write for that same disc on a vanilla 1541 drive.
I had a Fastload cartridge too. You can blame Jack Tramiel and the penny pinchers at Commodore's HQ for also forcing the C=64 and 1541 to use the Vic-20's 6 pin serial port that bogged down the transfer speed.
The Parallel version of the drive was always a bit janky but that's what you saw most on PCs. SCSI was a big of a luxury on most PC systems and always tricky to setup. The IDE versions were good but did not come to till later.
Iomega even sold a zip (and later jazz) branded PC SCSI adapter.
I still have a IDE Zip drive stored away. btw Did Iomega ever make a Zip 100 portable USB version?
Yes and no. The reason they switched to serial in the first place, is because the IEEE-488 Parallel cables were *very* expensive, and sometimes hard to get. Quality control was much more difficult back then, because the manufacturing techniques were less precise. So a lot of cables failed during testing, before even leaving the factory.
But also: The MOS6522 VIA chip had a "shift register" that would be capable of serializing the parallel data rapidly and with little processor overhead. Unfortunately, a timing bug was discovered in the shift register. A framing error could occur when the clocks between the 6522 chips in the VIC-20 and the 1540 disk drive were not synchronized - this would cause the serial bus to lock up. Greg Berlin at Commodore had to change the serialparallel routines to be "bit-banged" by the 6502 processor instead - a slow, clumsy method, but it worked, and a stock VIC-20 only had 5k of RAM in the first place, so it wasn't a big deal.
The C64 used the 6526 I/O chip, which had a fully functional shift register, and so the circuit board for the C64 was wired to take advantage of this. But then Murphy's Law raised its ugly head, and a minor rework of the board at the board manufacturers (to accommodate a screw hole!) discarded the high-speed wire - dooming the C64's serial bus to bit-banging once more. Worse still, the new VIC-II chip periodically interrupted the 6510 processor during disk drive communication, thus generating "jitter" into the timing. This meant that the serial bus was slowed down EVEN MORE to make it reliable again! As a result, we had to wait for the 1571, and the Commodore 128, which had "Burst Mode" and a fully working pair of 6526's.
There were more reasons why it was slow, but this is a wall of text already... if you really want to know, just ask. :)
Most speed loaders that didn't require hardware modifications, like the Fastload cartridge, worked by overriding the IEC serial protocol; for example, by sending the data two bits at a time. Since the clock line was not being used by the 6526 chip, they could send data down the clock *and* data line at the same time.
I still have a boatlaod of Zip discs and a few drives laying about....
Ohhh! THESE!! I remember when these where first showing up here in Argentina. Thought they where the future. I was still a child, so I could not afford it. Plus, I think these had a prohibitive price tag as well. Silly import taxes...Anyway, thanks for the trip down the memory lane =)
Eran carísimos tal cual!
No cambió mucho la cosa 20 años después.
En mi pais, en 2004, un disco Zip de 100MB llegaba a costar 12 dolares.
En Latinoamerica en general, llegaron muy tarde y muy caro. 2 años despues los grabadores de CD ya estaban en todos lados.
Mi papá tuvo el extraible a principios de los 00s, eran muy buenos, llevaba 2 disquetes de esos y ni usabas el primero a 100%, ahorrabas mucho en disquetes floppy
Back when i'm in the middle school, using floppy disk, and there is one computer in the school lab using zip drive, me like "WOW 100 MEGS ! MY HARD DRIVE IN MY OWN COMPUTER IN MY HOME HAD LESS STORAGE SPACE"
nowadays, we're laugh to 32 GB flash drive, only capable to store few movies, even few TB hard drive is full in the matter of months.
I bought a 1 tb hard drive in 2007. At the time I thought there was no possible way I could ever fill it up.
I bought a 500 GB hdd in 2010 and still have 110 GB free space.
so true i remember when i was blown away at my computer having a 250 gb drive now my 1tb only has 200 g FREE in a little less than a year same as my 4g flash drive being considered so big and now my thumb drive is 64
anyone remember the "Click of Death" :D
I had 3 replaced under warranty lol
The worst thing is that it does not only destroy itself; it also destroys your ZIP discs :O
Didn't iomega fix that issue with their later Zip 250 drive ?
We had to replace an entire classroom of zip drives more than once, as well as every disk because click of death was contagious. Bad disks would damage the drive, giving it COD, then and disk used in that drive would become damaged and would give COD to other drives it was tried to be used in.
Eventually the cause of mass drive failures was figured out and new model drives and disks that were immune got installed.
I liked that class. Before that, a high school "computer class" was basically just a modern rehash of the old typewriter classes, so you only learned the basics and the focus was on using word as of we were going to have to transcribed stuff former. (I middle school we did have computer class as well, but that was mostly typing and was on ancient Apple IIe's, but our teacher did get in to programming on them sometimes, which was amazing at the time.) The high school class with the zip drives was something all together an experiment here in combination with an English and history class. Unlike normal class assignments, every student in this program had the same 3 teachers for these classes, just at different times, in 3 rotations. Instead of being about lessons and doing single tasks, it more focused on projects and was more like professional work than normal school has been prior (at one point we ab multi month long project of actually running a business at the school which would be in competition against the other half of students in the program and sold some foodstuffs to students). The computer class severed both as a sort of dedicated lab period for working on projects of the other 2 classes (which themselves had overlap with each other), but also had it's own projects focused on using various software packages at the time like early Photoshop and basic 3D cad. This was why we needed zip disks, floppies were just to small and server based storage at the time was out of the program's budget.
I have that program to thank/blame for my first job, which was working in the IT department of the school district. Not only were they the ones that flew the job opening in class senior year (was TA for comp class then), but apparently because I had been in that program, I, and another dude from another school (shoutout to Aubert for introducing me to happy hardcore and generally being a cool guy), were instant hires over the other random 10-12 random kids that applied.
Ingesting times.
I remember seeing these installed in the same 3.5" drive bays on PCs, usually those machines had a 56x CD drive, a zip drive, and a 3.5" floppy drive.
Wow, I still have my ZIP250 USB drive sitting on my basement and I thought that was old. Back in the day, I thought this held SO MUCH data.
By the way, your Windows 95 PC seems really fast and snappy. Like a lot snappier than my crappy Windows 10 system.
Windows 10 has a lot of overhead. Think of how much spying M$ can do with a 20GB OS. Windows 95? About 50MB. I would really like to see OSes get back to being streamlined.
OS's? Hell programming in general, Everyone has fallen into the "Add More Code!"/"Patch it Later" Pits. I would love to see old code debugged and streamlined. Too many are programming for 'Top of the Line' just on the market systems. Too much bloatware.
spying needs you to connect and update more. It's Not more Memory in an OS, it is in the constant need to fix bugs and errors *.1, *.2, *.5 ect updating software.
Those things were a godsend when CD-R media still cost 20 bucks a pop, assuming you could afford the burner. I used to leave mine at the computer lab at school overnight, using the campus internet to download the latest Slackware Linux release. Then one sad day, Slackware grew past 100MB...
I recall spending $100 for a CD burner. As soon as I plugged it in there was a firmware update that bricked it.
I love how your hand looks over the screen at 15:00
Looks like some kind of faux-greenscreen effect!
I don't know why this older video of yours (from 2017!) came up as a suggested video, but it brought back some memories! Thanks for sharing.
I have an internal Zip drive lying around in a box somewhere. Connected via IDE/ATA ribbon cable like a typical hard drive did, but showed in Windows 95 as a floppy. Which is fine unless you already had a B drive, in which case Win95 would get somewhat confused about things. This was fixed in 95B when the driver was changed to declare it a removable drive instead of a floppy.
I also still have a Jaz 1GB SCSI model as well as the SCSI bus controller and cables. At the time, that was _the_ hot setup for fast removable bulk storage, and it remained a rare top-shelf type setup until flash memory basically ended the reason for basically every other form of removable media to exist. I ended up writing a pretty popular article on how to fix the Click of Death on Jaz drives (as their problem was a lack of lubrication on the drive head's guide rails, which caused them to bind), but that article's long since disappeared from the Internet and my searches haven't turned it up.
Shoulda kept a copy of it on a Zip disk! ;-)
I still use SCSI zip drives to transfer files between my Atari machines and my USB based PC zip drive.
The ZipCD was the first CD-R drive we ever had. I still have it and an Imation 120mb floptical drive in the attic
When you put in the "click of death" part in the video... that the part of the video that I was hoping to see. You really know your hardware! Have a great Sunday.
only LGR can talk about an outdated method of storage for 22 minutes, lol
And keep it interesting the entire way!
my father had one of these zip drives on his 486 dx4 100, and believe me, this was the shit back in the day
I love it :D
There's another guy you should check out called Vwestlife. He's not as vibrant as LGR or the other guys, but he's incredibly informative and finds more obscure stuff. I believe he's been seen hanging around all 3 channels at one point or another.
LSU had Zip drives installed in pretty much every computer lab computer back in the day. I used them ALL the time for assignments and other stuff when I was an undergrad in the late 90s and early 00s until flash drives came along. MAME ran pretty well off them, too.
Miami University was the same. Zip drives everywhere.
...Except for the English department, where they insisted on iMacs... :)
Back in the nineties, I had an internal ZIP drive, and my brother had an external SCSI drive. He contacted me recently, hoping I could copy his thesis from an old disk. Unfortunately, both of us had given our drives away. Fortunately, the school he teaches at is so behind the times, that one of the departments still uses them! He was able to recover his data.
The first time I heard about and used zip drives/disks was in college. The computers in our college computer labs all had internal zip drives and the book store sold zip disks and had a few external drives you could buy for your own computer. I was always tempted to buy a drive for my computer at home, but the price was just too much. But yea, by my third year of college, a number of the zip drives died and I remember having to memorize what computers had working zip drives and which ones didn't, and hope a computer with a working zip drive was available. (In all fairness though, a number of floppy drives on some of the computers didn't work either.)
I remember this. My computer tech teacher in Junior High was so excited to have one of those. At the time I thought it was so cool.
I had the fancy USB version. I freaking loved it. I got it because all computers in my college had zip. It was so damn convenient.
🤔 if my memory serves me correctly... I do believe zip disks were too slow to play MP3's. I had the parallel port one.
Social Distancing Sam The parallel port interface was a serious bottleneck to the Zip drive. The scsi and ide versions were magnitudes faster.
I have a music sampler I still use which reads samples directly from the Zip disk, so it's pretty damn fast. That's an internal drive using IDE though.
Yeah. Apparently the parallel port ones were super slow. 😔
This is slowly turning out to be my fave channel on YT
I wanted one of these when I was young.
I may be weird, but I love looking at the bookshelves in the backs of all of LGR videos and seeing how many games, programs, whatever i can recognize. it's just as fun as learning and remembering all the old tech we used to live for as computer geeks.