Want to see _inside_ of the Clik PCMCIA drive? Here's a bonus clip for you! th-cam.com/video/SX4mA2m8kO0/w-d-xo.html I didn't fully disassemble it when I made the Oddware episode because doing so destroys the drive, just due to the glue used and flimsy metal getting bent -- at least without the correct tools/skills. But well, now that I am convinced the drive is very much dead anyway, I figured "hey, why not rip it open and look at its guts."
@@Zeriel00 Or an episode where he reviews say, an Apple II (ie. 1977 tech) dressed and acting as though it's the early 90s. Presented as being "from the LGR vault"
You know Clint, I had no interest in the kind of things you're interested in until I started watching your videos. I used to just watch your video game reviews for a quick caption of what I could expect to find, eventually migrating myself to your other videos to see what you did. Honestly I'm still not that jazzed on most of the old hardware, it's how enraptured you are; you know your shit on so many subjects, and honestly it's your interest in the subject that holds my interest in your videos. I mean I just spent 17 minutes watching a video about a freakin zipdrive. You are extremely engaging and you do an absolutely fantastic job, and I just wanted to say thank you.
I'm vaguely interested in any sort of outdated computer technology, but there's no way I'd know half as much about any of it without people like you that make it entertaining to learn about. Keep doing what you do, man.
The PCMCIA versions dying like that was a common occurrence in my experience. I was a tech at a high volume (50+ daily) laptop repair facility from the late 90's through the 2000's. A particular pharmaceutical customer used those Clik drives along with Zip drives for additional backup storage for all their field reps. It seemed like the PCMCIA Clik drives were quite unreliable for them, not to mention the click of death on the Zip drives also being a big issue. As broadband service rolled out to more and more areas in the early 2000's they adopted using client/server based backup software instead and phased out all forms of media like the Clik and Zip drives which meant the facility I worked at got thousands of those drives, media and so on dumped on us when that happened!
I feel like if you were able to press the files of Duke Nukem 3D onto a Vinyl Record, and somehow play it off of that you would. You already have ways to store it on a VHS tape.
Fernie Canto estimates vary widely, but over 100 MB seems reasonable. Compression could push it further depending on the data stored. See: www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/27zksf/theoretically_what_is_the_data_capacity_of_a/
I remember seeing these on the R&D desk when I was working at Iomega in 1997. For '97 tech they were amazing, but being released in '99 they were pretty much a flash in the pan. Thanks for the trip down memory lane!
That product at 5:40 is the most early 2000's thing I've ever seen. Look at those beautiful rounded edges. Look at that oval screen. It's like staring into the face of early 2000's God.
If only they would have put the shutter on the UMD! That was the thing that killed that format. It was plenty good for what it was designed for, but they just got so incredibly dirty so fast that it was just... Blah.
“Mmmm Windows 95 ❤️” I appreciate the subtitles, Clint! English is not my native language so having very well written subtitles helps a lot to better understand what you’re seeing. You da’ man, Clint!
@Xqrement: For someone who claims that English is not their native language you seem to have an excellent command of it, at least based on your comment above. Congratulations! You know English better that 90% of everyone who's ever commented on TH-cam!
The "click of death" is something I immediately thought of when I saw the title of this video. A bit of a marketing blunder there, since the term 'click of death' STARTED with iomega zip disc drives. It now refers to similar sounds from dead hard drives when the read/write heads continuously attempt and fail to seek, so even now it isn't an especially good idea. It's a fascinating little thing and its appearance reminds me a little of the UMDs that the PSP used - optical discs built in to their own protective caddy, instead of a magnetic disc in the case of the Clik. Too bad for it that flash memory and compact HDDs ended up overtaking it rapidly in pretty much every way.
You can't blame Sony for trying to make yet another properietary method of memory they owned. Taking chances like that has put the company in the place it is today! I do blame them however for that god awful naming convention. UMD is irony in of itself.
I found one of these in clearance bin once around Father's Day long ago, and I also thought the idea was really neat (I used to use Zip disks a lot for work anyways), so I got a couple and gave one to Dad. Neither of us ever used it, at all (afaik). I never even opened mine I just had no actual use for it.
I still have around 80 of these things, filled with early 2000 documents galore. I first bought one for my Sony PictureBook (PCMCIA version), remember those, I even had the best and last one, though any computer with a Transmeta CPU, can't really be called the best, in fact the previous generation using a Pentium 2, was actually faster. Though I used Debian Linux, so the PictureBook wasn't that slow. I continued to use the Click drive for about 10 years in almost all of my notebooks and early tablets, I actually loved the medium, it was perfect for storing data for long deration's of time that needed to still be accessible in a moments notice. I finally replaced the system with a Sony Magneto-optical drive and than later Mini-Disks, yes, Sony actually made a data orientated Mini-Disk drive, the very rare Sony MDH-10, I still use it today for data when I want to store data at the bank, Don't worry, I have two, unopened Sony MDH-10 drives, I bought all three of them when they were being sold for less than $100. MiniDisk data disks actually last a long time, I have yet to have seen any data corruption as of yet.
Oh yeah : ) - I had the MP3 player that used those - lots of memories of sitting on the school bus listening to Linkin Park, 'Cos I got High' and 'Baby Got Back'
I’m gutted, my girlfriend and me both used Click! drives back then but I never knew there were Click! based MP3 players until now! I wold probably have bought one if I’d known?
I still have a few old flash drives with like 128MB AND 256MB. Back then that was a lot. Seeing as MP3 files were around 3MB it was the main use for having large capacities. People would use CD-R DIsk to put movies in that were like 700MB Per movie
Im still handling and maintaining legacy storage and servers. Click drive is lightyears away and far more advanced. It gives me a big smile knowing that the company i work with still don't plan on migrating their data into modern storage.
Hey Clint, you're looking really well. Thanks so much for your videos. I never knew that watching someone go thrifting and discuss pieces of tech (that I had little prior interest in!) could be such great therapy during this current low point I'm experiencing. I've seen many comments about people enjoying your videos during depressive or difficult phases; the fact that your honest, enthusiastic self and your well-made videos have helped so many get through little rough patches in life is something you should be incredibly proud of.
Pish posh! In that alphabet soup of late '90s portable storage media, how could you forget the mighty Caleb UHD144 "it" drive!? Actually, the problem was that when it was introduced in 1998, nobody else noticed it, either...
I remember being completely blown away when the 100 MB ZipDisks came out during the 90s when I was a teenager. Oh, it was at a local CompUSA too. Yet another relic from another time :) Now I'm watching an HD video over a phone that has 128gb of storage and 8gbs of RAM. Amazing how far we have come.
Wow, that little PCMCIA floppy disk drive must be the world's smallest model of floppy disk drive! I knew about the bigger ones, but have never been aware of the card-sized ones until now! I wonder how they could ever have fit the mechanics in there! Amazing! Then again, the MicroDrive is amazing too: the world's physically smallest hard disks! They're very amazing to me as well!
HipZip was my first mp3 player. I selected it because it was the cheapest per MB at the time and I liked swappable storage. It was pretty solid, actually.
The Clik! PC Card is shockingly prone to heat wear. They work a lot better if your PC card bay isn't exposed to the heat of the CPU too much. I noticed this on my IBM T23 and it's dock. The internal card slot frequently caused failure in the PC card, to the point it couldn't detect the discs. However, when I insert the card into the dock, far from the laptop's CPU, performance was near perfect with no failure.
I remember being very curious about these, they came out around the time I was starting my engineering degreee. A couple years later a friend came to my home for a LAN party and he casually happened to have the PCMCIA one. I was fascinated. Always loved the look of the disks.
A typically good video: thank you. I hope you'll look into the Jaz drive next. I had two Zip drives (100 and 250MB) but the Jaz drive I only saw in advertisements.
I once considered getting one of these to complement the two external Zip drives I'd bought some time earlier. At that time the Zip's 100MB capacity and (relatively) low price for the drive and discs made it a very attractive deal (100 MB on one disc? WOW!). But the Clik drive came out about the time that blank CD-Rs and CD-RWs were coming down in price and could hold more than 10x what a 40MB Clik disc could so I decided not to gamble my money on one. Another reason being that back then most desktop systems didn't come with a slot (PCM-CIA?) for plugging in the drive. This drive was better suited for laptop use and back then laptops were hideously expensive. BTW, I still have those two Zip drives, I haven't plugged them in in ages, though. IIRC, they were SCSI units or at least one of them was since I used to use it with my various Amigas (actually, IIRC, I also had a SCSI card in my PC).
16:30 I remember this standing on my own store's shelf in Germany, getting older day by day, and not a single customer buying it; occasionally asking about it.
Thanks for the video Clint, I remember seeing the PCMCIA version of this on clearance at Best Buy around 2003 or 2004. I believe it was $40, I did not pick one up but probably should have. It really is an interesting piece of hardware.
Please make a disassembly video of your dead pcmcia drive ! I want to see how they managed to put all the mechanism for a magnetic drive in a such small volume !
[kryode] that’s awesome! Long live old technology! I collected old cameras for the longest and camcorders and cameras for the 80s and 90s are truly my favorites
When I was 12, I had a Commodore Amiga 1000 with expanded RAM that raised it to a total of 1 MB. They weren't very popular or widespread in the US but my brother was loyal to the Commodore brand so I just followed suit because I was kid and just wanted to fit in with the older crowd. Nearly all my games were cracked PAL copies he'd get from BBS's and Commodore Club meetings in the basement of a nearby bingo hall. Hehehe.
I think that by the time people bought those (you said early 2000's) USB flash drives were starting to come onto the market (and granted, while they weren't all that spacious to begin with) by about 2004, we did have 64MB flash drives available so it's likely that this Clik disk system was a bit too late, perhaps an effort by IOMega to hold onto a dying market when everyone started to move to USB flash drives starting around that time.
Probably not the best design, though it was innovative for its' time. It most certainly did provide a learning tool for others. No, I've never actually used one of these; I had seen it once, but I was a bit too young to comprehend it.
I had a parallel port Zipdrive back in 1995, 100MB pr.disk. was a lot back then. I got the infamous "click of death" while rendering a "Vista Pro" landscape video. That was it for me & zipdrive's
I remember working in a computer store, and the Iomega rep trying to introduce these to us about a year before they came out. And not a single one of us thought these were going to make anything better. Cool looking, but pretty much pointless. That poor rep was the most defeated man, trying to push these things.
What an interesting form of removable storage. It seems, what they were going for was a miniaturized floppy disk. If this had come out maybe five years before it did, I bet it would have been really successful. Good idea for the time, just too late to market.
Damn! Great childhood memories! I had some of these together with an Iomega HipZip: www.activewin.com/reviews/hardware/zip/hipzip/images/disks.jpg It was really nice walking around with a bunch of MP3s playing from this tiny disk. The HipZip was really cool and not much larger than a regular tape walk man. And I also messed around with WMA encoding so I could fit more songs on those 40 megabytes.
In 2003 my parents bought my brother and I our first digital cameras. I still have the 32mb compact flash card we bought for mine. Storage used to cost a lot! I remeber being mesmerised by that little square piece of plastic. I can see why storage mediums like this didn't last long. The solid state SD and compact flash cards are so much more elegant.
Discovered I have a couple blank mini-disks and now it's bugging me I have nothing that can read/write to them or use them at all, tempted to hunt down a USB capable device that can run them
I remember these things. I was in tech school at the time when the instructor brought up the then-upcoming new Clik format. Based on the scant details we had of the product, almost everyone in the class agreed that the proprietary nature and small capacity were going to be major limitations, particularly in the face of the technologies you mentioned. While it's possible to cram more data into such limited space, mechanical reliability starts becoming an issue, particularly for a portable device, and doubly so for something that frankly didn't look all that physically robust.
Maybe not as convenient by today's means, but I gotta commend Iomega for creating one of the first proprietary ecosystems of storage devices, before a product ecosystem was even a thing! Also, Iomega's branding and design language is nothing short of amazing.
Dear LGR, thank you for playing that Windows 95 boot sound every time. Even if I didn't have a PC when it came out (I was just a yougin'), I used to go to my uncle who always had all the greatest hardware. And even if I didn't understand it back then, this sound coming through his overpowered Cambridge Soundworks system (with subwoofer!), reminded me of the excitement that awaits. Keep it up!
Everything about the camera kit just seems so cumbersome and roundabout, all to transfer a "small" 64MB CF card onto a "large" 40MB clik. Gee I wonder why this failed.
SuperDisk was a cool format. Similar to zip disks (with a little more capacity at 120 MB), but they were compatible with regular floppy disks too. So you could clone your 1.44mb disks with it too. :)
Gotta love the old days of 90's pcing where it would say "100% complete!" for like 4-5 minutes straight. No wait that sucked and noone liked it. Bad design microsoft!
Um... The semi-modern (2015 and newer) lower-end devices running windows 10 that I play around with STILL do that during updates and downloads. Apparently, some things never fully change...
I worked at Iomega during the Clik era. They were **really** proud of the sound it made when you put a disk in. Management wanted it to feel like a clicky ball point pen for some reason. I think that's why they stuck with the name for so long, even in the face of the Click of Death. They were very attached to that idea. A bit of trivia: the movie Minority Report used removable media shaped like a Clik disk. You can see the little black plastic corners and the overall shape of the thing, but all the actual metal and disk bits were replaced with a transparent piece. The holographic UI effects were then layered onto the transparent portion.
I gotta say that in 2000, the Hip Zip was my first MP3 player and at the time, it got rave reviews for the audio quality. To be honest, I loved that little player at the time. I thought I was the shit when it came to cutting-edge tech. The downside was that the little discs only held about 5 or 6 songs depending on their bit-rate/quality. So, if I was at the gym, I'd end up stopping for a second and changing discs several times through my workout. It's amazing how far we've come with memory storage 22 years later. Now I'm using 2TB and 4TB NVME drives in near-thumb-drive-size enclosures that have unbelievable transfer rates. In 2000, if you told me how fast NVME SSDs were and how much storage they could hold, I would have thought you were on crack.
So, I still have my clik drive. The one I got (on clearance back in the day) came with an USB to PCMCIA dock for the PC and the drive itself. The drive and 2 additional clik disks could be placed in this rather nice metal case for storage. (3 if you keep one in the drive). I need to figure out where the dock itself went, as it would make it oh so more useful to actually use the clik on newer systems. Great video as always!
You stop and wonder, what, in the world, were they thinking? And i know this is from another time, but the question stands on the basis of the fact that, this is a dog's chow. It really is. It wants to be portable, but you need a man pouch to use it, it wants to be useful, but really can't compete with anything on the market from the new age, it wants to look cool, but the design was form around function... Who are these people at iOmega that thought they knew design, marketing, marketability, prices, the world around them? Boggles the mind, it really does. Worst part about this is, this kind of stuff exists today, only problem is, being that we have BigCorp we're left without options, you have to swallow the pill regardless of how many edges there are. And it spans across all kinds of platforms. Games, tools, computers, phones, software. There's no punishment incurred by bad design, not one that translates, anyways.
I finally found 2 different USB Clik!/PocketZip drives which I added to my collection, both on ebay for very reasonable prices. USB versions very rarely seem to show up. Blank disk prices have skyrocketed. Its insane. Awesome video. Very interesting format which I do not remember. I bought an Iomega Zip drive when they came out while in college, then upgraded to a Jazz drive when it came out, graduated, started working and by that time solid state/optical storage replaced all these other formats.
I had a friend, a very rich friend, that had to have the newest of everything when it came out. He had this in I guess 1999 or so, in the equivalent of what would be a Netbook today. It was in a Sony Vaio machine, so the whole thing was quite cute all-told. I have a Roland Fantom-XR which has a PCMCIA-to-CF adapter in it right now, the card I have in there is 1 GB. I’m so unnecessarily tempted to find a click-drive and see if my Fantom would boot up from it, instead of the CF, just for fun. I probably never will, but you know... This video got me really considering it.
We used ours with Windows CE based hand held PC’s that didn’t have optical drives and whilst a bunch of Hand Held PC 2000 devices had USB ports CE drivers didn’t seem to exist for anything (including f#&@ing mice FFS?!) never mind CD writers.
I was a year away from my first CD-R drive, and I don't recall the RWs being all that cheap even then.... I think I still had my Zip drive, but half the disks were screwed.
Talk about timing! I watched this video over breakfast and by chance was given the PC Card version by the afternoon, cool 🤗! Just hope my one doesn’t die as quick as yours.
saturnotaku Ni-MH actually has about the same power per volume as Li-Ion ones in average, just slightly less. The power per weight is it's achiles heel. Maybe you're confusing with Ni-Cd ones?
I worked at Iomega during the Clik era. They were **really** proud of the sound it made when you put a disk in. Management wanted it to feel like a clicky ball point pen for some reason. I think that's why they stuck with the name for so long, even in the face of the Click of Death. They were very attached to that idea. A bit of trivia: the movie Minority Report used removable media shaped like a Clik disk. You can see the little black plastic corners and the overall shape of the thing, but all the actual metal and disk bits were replaced with a transparent piece. The holographic UI effects were then layered onto the transparent portion.
Want to see _inside_ of the Clik PCMCIA drive? Here's a bonus clip for you!
th-cam.com/video/SX4mA2m8kO0/w-d-xo.html
I didn't fully disassemble it when I made the Oddware episode because doing so destroys the drive, just due to the glue used and flimsy metal getting bent -- at least without the correct tools/skills. But well, now that I am convinced the drive is very much dead anyway, I figured "hey, why not rip it open and look at its guts."
Keep up the great work! I love your videos
Yahoo you found one thank you LGR your video's are outstanding.
RIP Clik Drive....
LGR ,
Thank you!
You should do an Oddware episode for April Fools which treats something not odd (like USB drives) as if they never caught on and are not in use today.
Nono a FUTURE episode reviewing current tech as old, and he can dress up like he's from the future xD
@@Zeriel00 or a past episode where he current tech as the future and dresses like he's in the past.
A USB-C 128 GB flash drive would seem like alien tech to someone in the 90s.
Or like a MuVo MP3 player. April fools plus real video in one!
@@Zeriel00 Or an episode where he reviews say, an Apple II (ie. 1977 tech) dressed and acting as though it's the early 90s. Presented as being "from the LGR vault"
Duke 3D: LGR's version of: "Can it run Crysis?" :D
nope it's capacity is way to low lol
Cool
Lemme see if I can PKZip or stuffit onto a Mac 512 and see if it can
13:16 Well not a Click of Death but the Death of a Clik, huh?
Iomega might as well be named "Clicks and Death Incorporated".
Yes, we did test it on the Bonnevie salt flats
You know Clint, I had no interest in the kind of things you're interested in until I started watching your videos. I used to just watch your video game reviews for a quick caption of what I could expect to find, eventually migrating myself to your other videos to see what you did. Honestly I'm still not that jazzed on most of the old hardware, it's how enraptured you are; you know your shit on so many subjects, and honestly it's your interest in the subject that holds my interest in your videos. I mean I just spent 17 minutes watching a video about a freakin zipdrive. You are extremely engaging and you do an absolutely fantastic job, and I just wanted to say thank you.
And thank _you_ for the kind words, I'm glad the videos have struck a chord :)
I'm vaguely interested in any sort of outdated computer technology, but there's no way I'd know half as much about any of it without people like you that make it entertaining to learn about. Keep doing what you do, man.
Sounds like this video really *clik-d* with you.
that was terrible. I love it.
Dan Reader Absolutely know how you feel
The PCMCIA versions dying like that was a common occurrence in my experience. I was a tech at a high volume (50+ daily) laptop repair facility from the late 90's through the 2000's. A particular pharmaceutical customer used those Clik drives along with Zip drives for additional backup storage for all their field reps. It seemed like the PCMCIA Clik drives were quite unreliable for them, not to mention the click of death on the Zip drives also being a big issue. As broadband service rolled out to more and more areas in the early 2000's they adopted using client/server based backup software instead and phased out all forms of media like the Clik and Zip drives which meant the facility I worked at got thousands of those drives, media and so on dumped on us when that happened!
yepe it's capacity is way to low lol
Oh man the sound of insertion for those disks is pretty satisfying
I can confirm it is EXTREMELY satisfying doing the clicking as well.
thats what SHE said
Remind me of the click of an irl p90 magazine being pulled out it's the most statifying thing every
I want one just for that reason.
I feel like if you were able to press the files of Duke Nukem 3D onto a Vinyl Record, and somehow play it off of that you would.
You already have ways to store it on a VHS tape.
I absolutely would, haha. I know there were some games distributed on flexi disc vinyl!
Were you supposed to plug your stereo into a tape drive cable?
larryinc64 technically certain models of PC do have tape inputs (PCJR, etc) but most of these aren't capable of running Duke3D
I do wonder, considering today's technology, how much data would fit on one side of a vinyl record...
Fernie Canto estimates vary widely, but over 100 MB seems reasonable. Compression could push it further depending on the data stored. See: www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/27zksf/theoretically_what_is_the_data_capacity_of_a/
It could hold an entire mp3 file and a picture of Cindy Crawford at the same time! Wow!
It's the future!
Hmmmm cindy crawford....... Whatever happened to her?
She must be getting a pension now lol..
It could hold quite a few of both, at 40 MB
I remember seeing these on the R&D desk when I was working at Iomega in 1997. For '97 tech they were amazing, but being released in '99 they were pretty much a flash in the pan. Thanks for the trip down memory lane!
That product at 5:40 is the most early 2000's thing I've ever seen. Look at those beautiful rounded edges. Look at that oval screen. It's like staring into the face of early 2000's God.
Blue Laser I had one. It was great
I forgot that 2000’s is now kind of vintage for kids
@@josecarlosxyz "For kids"? The early 2000s are as vintage now as the 90's were in 2010.
Plus that Windows 95 start up sound was sweet, sweet nostalgia.
Yuupp
I heard that so much as a young adult. Wow.
:D
Good ol' Windows 95. Yeah, that startup sound definitely brings back the memories.
Yeah, you are right!)
"Boss, our technology is becoming obsolete. What do we do?"
"Carry on and double-down."
Wait, you were there during the insider meetings at Intel from 2011-2019? And nVidia's Tegra CPU branch _since_ 2012?
@@acumenium8157 It's called "satire."
@@Landrew0 Strikingly accurate! :D
"There'll be peace when you are done"
Almost reminds me of a PSP UMD.
There's a format that was destined to die(and sucked).
lmfao if you honestly think the umd format died or was close to dying then you're lost.
If only they would have put the shutter on the UMD! That was the thing that killed that format. It was plenty good for what it was designed for, but they just got so incredibly dirty so fast that it was just... Blah.
Is it used anywhere else? I'm not trying to argue, I'm just curious.
No, UMD died in 2014. Nothing uses it anymore.
The disks are adorable, it would be so cool to have a revival of that design
The dying drive sounded like a distressed duck ;(
Couldn't handle The Duke.
Clik
Sounds like the air-horn noise in that Thug Life meme
I remember seeing those in stores back in the day... Never crossed my mind to buy one. $300 was back then food for a month plus a few movie tickets...
stamasd now that’s a few movie tickets.
What kind of lifestyle do you have now? $300 is enough money to buy food for TWO months and a few cinema tickets, NOW.
@@kosztaz87 He probably ate out a lot.
@@kosztaz87this didn’t age well
300 gets you a loaf of bread and they kick you in the crotch on the way out
@@HobbiesGamesChillin Yeah things have gone to sh*t the last few years.
That Clik! Camera kit has more parts and assembly than some Lego sets.
Cost about the same though
“Mmmm Windows 95 ❤️” I appreciate the subtitles, Clint! English is not my native language so having very well written subtitles helps a lot to better understand what you’re seeing. You da’ man, Clint!
Xqrement I like to watch LGR with subtitles just because of the little details like that thrown into the captions
@Xqrement: For someone who claims that English is not their native language you seem to have an excellent command of it, at least based on your comment above. Congratulations! You know English better that 90% of everyone who's ever commented on TH-cam!
Likewise. I love having the subtitles because I have obnoxiously loud little kids that make it hard to hear anything.
The "click of death" is something I immediately thought of when I saw the title of this video. A bit of a marketing blunder there, since the term 'click of death' STARTED with iomega zip disc drives. It now refers to similar sounds from dead hard drives when the read/write heads continuously attempt and fail to seek, so even now it isn't an especially good idea.
It's a fascinating little thing and its appearance reminds me a little of the UMDs that the PSP used - optical discs built in to their own protective caddy, instead of a magnetic disc in the case of the Clik. Too bad for it that flash memory and compact HDDs ended up overtaking it rapidly in pretty much every way.
lomega is clearly not deprived of self-irony (I apologize in advance for my English)
You can't blame Sony for trying to make yet another properietary method of memory they owned. Taking chances like that has put the company in the place it is today! I do blame them however for that god awful naming convention. UMD is irony in of itself.
I love the concept of these things. They're like a 1980's idea of what future storage media might look like.
90s and there were way better storage mediums around back then.
I found one of these in clearance bin once around Father's Day long ago, and I also thought the idea was really neat (I used to use Zip disks a lot for work anyways), so I got a couple and gave one to Dad. Neither of us ever used it, at all (afaik). I never even opened mine I just had no actual use for it.
go back to 1999 with a 64gb usb stick and watch people loose their minds.
Why not 1984 and how many versions of apple basic?
Why not 1950's and see how people freak out with their ENEACs?
Just you won't get the necessary drivers ^_^
@@ceneblock its ENIACs, not ENEACs.
64GB? Just take a 8TB HDD with you...
Why not 128 or 1tb
I was at Comdex when the click came out.. iOmega gave out these little noise "clickers" culminating in the most annoying show floor ever!
I feel your pain...
They gave those out at MacWorld in San Francisco, too. I think I still have mine somewhere...
I wonder if there are any pictures.
Hahaha!
I still have around 80 of these things, filled with early 2000 documents galore. I first bought one for my Sony PictureBook (PCMCIA version), remember those, I even had the best and last one, though any computer with a Transmeta CPU, can't really be called the best, in fact the previous generation using a Pentium 2, was actually faster. Though I used Debian Linux, so the PictureBook wasn't that slow. I continued to use the Click drive for about 10 years in almost all of my notebooks and early tablets, I actually loved the medium, it was perfect for storing data for long deration's of time that needed to still be accessible in a moments notice.
I finally replaced the system with a Sony Magneto-optical drive and than later Mini-Disks, yes, Sony actually made a data orientated Mini-Disk drive, the very rare Sony MDH-10, I still use it today for data when I want to store data at the bank, Don't worry, I have two, unopened Sony MDH-10 drives, I bought all three of them when they were being sold for less than $100. MiniDisk data disks actually last a long time, I have yet to have seen any data corruption as of yet.
I use dvd-ram.
I didn't know they had PCMCIA cards like that for non-flash storage, neato
All I've ever used were networking cards and various interfaces
Lassi Kinnunen IBM and Toshiba both made Hard Drives which went into a CompactFlash memory card slot.
the Amiga 600 & 1200 would even let you use flash pcmcia memory as a ram expansion iirc.
I wonder what it would have made of a clik disk?
Not just IBM and Toshiba; I have a 260MB single-slot Callunacard PC Card HDD, which is delightfully noisy and pretty cool IMO.
LeiserGeist There were even tv cards for PCMCIA.
There's been just about a PCMCIA everything.....
13:00 The sounds it made when it died was just satisfying, lovely!
Sounded like an engine lmao but like a really depressing motorcycle engine
Oh yeah : ) - I had the MP3 player that used those - lots of memories of sitting on the school bus listening to Linkin Park, 'Cos I got High' and 'Baby Got Back'
Same, I think each one held about 8 or so songs so I carried about 4-6 of them.
I’m gutted, my girlfriend and me both used Click! drives back then but I never knew there were Click! based MP3 players until now! I wold probably have bought one if I’d known?
I like cliks and I cannot lie.
Ash Slaughter love your pic. I miss that old dos icon
Are you sure you aren't confusing it with the Minidisk format...? They do both look a bit similar.
I still have a few old flash drives with like 128MB AND 256MB. Back then that was a lot. Seeing as MP3 files were around 3MB it was the main use for having large capacities. People would use CD-R DIsk to put movies in that were like 700MB Per movie
LGR: Nat Geo of vintage computing. Love your channel, takes me back to when I started to work with computers more seriously.
Im still handling and maintaining legacy storage and servers. Click drive is lightyears away and far more advanced. It gives me a big smile knowing that the company i work with still don't plan on migrating their data into modern storage.
For some reason at 10:44 I got the strange urge to listen to "Buddy Holly" by Weezer.
Hey Clint, you're looking really well. Thanks so much for your videos. I never knew that watching someone go thrifting and discuss pieces of tech (that I had little prior interest in!) could be such great therapy during this current low point I'm experiencing. I've seen many comments about people enjoying your videos during depressive or difficult phases; the fact that your honest, enthusiastic self and your well-made videos have helped so many get through little rough patches in life is something you should be incredibly proud of.
Dude that IBM Microdrive looks so friggen cool! You should def do an Oddware episode on it!!
Pish posh! In that alphabet soup of late '90s portable storage media, how could you forget the mighty Caleb UHD144 "it" drive!? Actually, the problem was that when it was introduced in 1998, nobody else noticed it, either...
VWestlife hi
"Alphabet soup"... my favorite quip was "What does PCMCIA mean?"
"People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms." :-)
I have to admit, that design and build quality reallz does look great even today. At least for that base drive. Great video as always
Man. Seeing your videos increase in production value over the years is amazing. Great content!
Thank you!
Ahhhhh, LGR. My favorite excuse to not be working.
I remember being completely blown away when the 100 MB ZipDisks came out during the 90s when I was a teenager. Oh, it was at a local CompUSA too. Yet another relic from another time :)
Now I'm watching an HD video over a phone that has 128gb of storage and 8gbs of RAM. Amazing how far we have come.
Old Ben: "Iomega - that's a name I've not heard in long time"
Vero Tabares Yes lomega needs to improve its drives.
>Iridescent
No, that's Holographic.
13:13 That's just the TURBO kicking in! Don't leave the clutch out, you'll over-rev it.
13:30 See, you flooded it.
Wow, that little PCMCIA floppy disk drive must be the world's smallest model of floppy disk drive! I knew about the bigger ones, but have never been aware of the card-sized ones until now! I wonder how they could ever have fit the mechanics in there! Amazing! Then again, the MicroDrive is amazing too: the world's physically smallest hard disks! They're very amazing to me as well!
Love to hear the W95 Startup sound. Kinda like the 1995 PSX start up; nostalgia
It's nice of you to put the metric system conversions 👍
HipZip was my first mp3 player. I selected it because it was the cheapest per MB at the time and I liked swappable storage. It was pretty solid, actually.
Oh man, I love LGR. I love Oddware. I love your “will it run Duke 3D?” approach to these things and odd bits. You are a gentleman, and a scholar.
The Clik! PC Card is shockingly prone to heat wear. They work a lot better if your PC card bay isn't exposed to the heat of the CPU too much. I noticed this on my IBM T23 and it's dock. The internal card slot frequently caused failure in the PC card, to the point it couldn't detect the discs. However, when I insert the card into the dock, far from the laptop's CPU, performance was near perfect with no failure.
Heat + Magnetic media = bad.
Great video! (oooh that Win 95 startup theme ding ding ding) By 2000 I was using my 4X CD-R burner for backing up and was hardly using my Zip drive.
Love when I get a notification for LGR and I happen to be online... WOOT WOOT Thx Clint!
These disks have a strong cyberpunk vibe to them. Very cool.
PCMCIA to Compact Flash adaptors are often used in the Amiga community to act as hard drives.
I remember being very curious about these, they came out around the time I was starting my engineering degreee. A couple years later a friend came to my home for a LAN party and he casually happened to have the PCMCIA one. I was fascinated. Always loved the look of the disks.
A typically good video: thank you. I hope you'll look into the Jaz drive next. I had two Zip drives (100 and 250MB) but the Jaz drive I only saw in advertisements.
Yeah, those things were always too expensive for me, I made do with my Zip 100 with half the disks dead inside 3 months.
I sold a few Jaz drives. Click drive? Nope.
I once considered getting one of these to complement the two external Zip drives I'd bought some time earlier. At that time the Zip's 100MB capacity and (relatively) low price for the drive and discs made it a very attractive deal (100 MB on one disc? WOW!). But the Clik drive came out about the time that blank CD-Rs and CD-RWs were coming down in price and could hold more than 10x what a 40MB Clik disc could so I decided not to gamble my money on one. Another reason being that back then most desktop systems didn't come with a slot (PCM-CIA?) for plugging in the drive. This drive was better suited for laptop use and back then laptops were hideously expensive. BTW, I still have those two Zip drives, I haven't plugged them in in ages, though. IIRC, they were SCSI units or at least one of them was since I used to use it with my various Amigas (actually, IIRC, I also had a SCSI card in my PC).
Hell yea some oddware to brighten my day
This is really the only thing keeping my going.
16:30 I remember this standing on my own store's shelf in Germany, getting older day by day, and not a single customer buying it; occasionally asking about it.
Didn't even know this existed. I switched from Zip to Jazz drives as quick as I could.
You mean... as CLIK as i could?
I'll show myself the way out.
Thanks for the video Clint, I remember seeing the PCMCIA version of this on clearance at Best Buy around 2003 or 2004. I believe it was $40, I did not pick one up but probably should have. It really is an interesting piece of hardware.
Please make a disassembly video of your dead pcmcia drive ! I want to see how they managed to put all the mechanism for a magnetic drive in a such small volume !
th-cam.com/video/SX4mA2m8kO0/w-d-xo.html
man, all your videos lately feel like LGR Tech Tales, you put so much effort in all of them!
Your videos are great to show to my 12 year old stepdaughter who believes nothing existed before smartphones and tablets.
Geez... when I was 12, I was 4 years away from getting my first PC (a 486 with single speed CD-ROM and 200 MB hard drive).
[kryode] that’s awesome! Long live old technology! I collected old cameras for the longest and camcorders and cameras for the 80s and 90s are truly my favorites
Molly Monoxide I’m 14 and for some reason this stuff just plain pleases me. And makes me want to buy old hardware.
I am also of the same class if age as [kyrode] and I also just adore 'old' tech. I have an Apple 2 that I use on a daily basis to make simple games.
When I was 12, I had a Commodore Amiga 1000 with expanded RAM that raised it to a total of 1 MB. They weren't very popular or widespread in the US but my brother was loyal to the Commodore brand so I just followed suit because I was kid and just wanted to fit in with the older crowd. Nearly all my games were cracked PAL copies he'd get from BBS's and Commodore Club meetings in the basement of a nearby bingo hall. Hehehe.
I think that by the time people bought those (you said early 2000's) USB flash drives were starting to come onto the market (and granted, while they weren't all that spacious to begin with) by about 2004, we did have 64MB flash drives available so it's likely that this Clik disk system was a bit too late, perhaps an effort by IOMega to hold onto a dying market when everyone started to move to USB flash drives starting around that time.
Also burnable CDs and eventually they would be built in most computers
Probably not the best design, though it was innovative for its' time.
It most certainly did provide a learning tool for others.
No, I've never actually used one of these; I had seen it once, but I was a bit too young to comprehend it.
I had a parallel port Zipdrive back in 1995, 100MB pr.disk. was a lot back then. I got the infamous "click of death" while rendering a "Vista Pro" landscape video. That was it for me & zipdrive's
Love your vids Clint
Thank you!
I remember working in a computer store, and the Iomega rep trying to introduce these to us about a year before they came out. And not a single one of us thought these were going to make anything better. Cool looking, but pretty much pointless. That poor rep was the most defeated man, trying to push these things.
All these overcomplicated obsolete physical media are great.
Sometimes I wish we lived in a internetless world so all physical media could be back.
What an interesting form of removable storage. It seems, what they were going for was a miniaturized floppy disk. If this had come out maybe five years before it did, I bet it would have been really successful. Good idea for the time, just too late to market.
Damn! Great childhood memories! I had some of these together with an Iomega HipZip: www.activewin.com/reviews/hardware/zip/hipzip/images/disks.jpg
It was really nice walking around with a bunch of MP3s playing from this tiny disk. The HipZip was really cool and not much larger than a regular tape walk man. And I also messed around with WMA encoding so I could fit more songs on those 40 megabytes.
In 2003 my parents bought my brother and I our first digital cameras. I still have the 32mb compact flash card we bought for mine. Storage used to cost a lot! I remeber being mesmerised by that little square piece of plastic. I can see why storage mediums like this didn't last long. The solid state SD and compact flash cards are so much more elegant.
I have one of those and 3 disks.. It makes a cool noise when writing
Seems quite interesting, looks like something Star Trek would have used for futuristic storage.
Reminds me of the Mini-Disc.
Discovered I have a couple blank mini-disks and now it's bugging me I have nothing that can read/write to them or use them at all, tempted to hunt down a USB capable device that can run them
Recorded a bunch of live stuff on MD, not as bad as everyone made it to be.
I remember these things. I was in tech school at the time when the instructor brought up the then-upcoming new Clik format. Based on the scant details we had of the product, almost everyone in the class agreed that the proprietary nature and small capacity were going to be major limitations, particularly in the face of the technologies you mentioned. While it's possible to cram more data into such limited space, mechanical reliability starts becoming an issue, particularly for a portable device, and doubly so for something that frankly didn't look all that physically robust.
"Damn, those alien bastards are gonna pay for cliking up my ride"
Maybe not as convenient by today's means, but I gotta commend Iomega for creating one of the first proprietary ecosystems of storage devices, before a product ecosystem was even a thing! Also, Iomega's branding and design language is nothing short of amazing.
3:51 for satisfying click sound. You're welcome.
Dear LGR, thank you for playing that Windows 95 boot sound every time. Even if I didn't have a PC when it came out (I was just a yougin'), I used to go to my uncle who always had all the greatest hardware. And even if I didn't understand it back then, this sound coming through his overpowered Cambridge Soundworks system (with subwoofer!), reminded me of the excitement that awaits. Keep it up!
Everything about the camera kit just seems so cumbersome and roundabout, all to transfer a "small" 64MB CF card onto a "large" 40MB clik. Gee I wonder why this failed.
64MB in 1999 -- 2005 would have been *very* expensive.
I remember spending nearly $50 for a 32MB CF around that time.
SuperDisk was a cool format. Similar to zip disks (with a little more capacity at 120 MB), but they were compatible with regular floppy disks too. So you could clone your 1.44mb disks with it too. :)
Gotta love the old days of 90's pcing where it would say "100% complete!" for like 4-5 minutes straight.
No wait that sucked and noone liked it. Bad design microsoft!
Um... The semi-modern (2015 and newer) lower-end devices running windows 10 that I play around with STILL do that during updates and downloads. Apparently, some things never fully change...
I worked at Iomega during the Clik era. They were **really** proud of the sound it made when you put a disk in. Management wanted it to feel like a clicky ball point pen for some reason. I think that's why they stuck with the name for so long, even in the face of the Click of Death. They were very attached to that idea.
A bit of trivia: the movie Minority Report used removable media shaped like a Clik disk. You can see the little black plastic corners and the overall shape of the thing, but all the actual metal and disk bits were replaced with a transparent piece. The holographic UI effects were then layered onto the transparent portion.
You always upload around lunch, which is when I'm able to watch videos. Yeah, I should be social, but why should I if LGR uploads?
Maybe I'll do that.
Spinning up a disk inside a PCMCIA form factor, amazing.
a floppy inside a PCMCIA card. we should be applauding that.
It is amazing, isn't it? You should check out the hard disk drive called MicroDrive! That's even *more* amazing to me!
Clint! Drive
I gotta say that in 2000, the Hip Zip was my first MP3 player and at the time, it got rave reviews for the audio quality. To be honest, I loved that little player at the time. I thought I was the shit when it came to cutting-edge tech. The downside was that the little discs only held about 5 or 6 songs depending on their bit-rate/quality. So, if I was at the gym, I'd end up stopping for a second and changing discs several times through my workout. It's amazing how far we've come with memory storage 22 years later. Now I'm using 2TB and 4TB NVME drives in near-thumb-drive-size enclosures that have unbelievable transfer rates. In 2000, if you told me how fast NVME SSDs were and how much storage they could hold, I would have thought you were on crack.
i still have mine and i still used it
Cool. What do you use it for?
mp3's from laptops that dont have a cd rom and deststop wallpaper
So, I still have my clik drive. The one I got (on clearance back in the day) came with an USB to PCMCIA dock for the PC and the drive itself. The drive and 2 additional clik disks could be placed in this rather nice metal case for storage. (3 if you keep one in the drive). I need to figure out where the dock itself went, as it would make it oh so more useful to actually use the clik on newer systems. Great video as always!
You stop and wonder, what, in the world, were they thinking?
And i know this is from another time, but the question stands on the basis of the fact that, this is a dog's chow. It really is. It wants to be portable, but you need a man pouch to use it, it wants to be useful, but really can't compete with anything on the market from the new age, it wants to look cool, but the design was form around function...
Who are these people at iOmega that thought they knew design, marketing, marketability, prices, the world around them?
Boggles the mind, it really does.
Worst part about this is, this kind of stuff exists today, only problem is, being that we have BigCorp we're left without options, you have to swallow the pill regardless of how many edges there are.
And it spans across all kinds of platforms. Games, tools, computers, phones, software. There's no punishment incurred by bad design, not one that translates, anyways.
People like you make the world boring.
I finally found 2 different USB Clik!/PocketZip drives which I added to my collection, both on ebay for very reasonable prices. USB versions very rarely seem to show up. Blank disk prices have skyrocketed. Its insane. Awesome video. Very interesting format which I do not remember. I bought an Iomega Zip drive when they came out while in college, then upgraded to a Jazz drive when it came out, graduated, started working and by that time solid state/optical storage replaced all these other formats.
this vid is clikbait 😉
Booooo!
Lol
rimshot.avi
i-see-what-you-did-there.jpg
Is it possible to give a TH-cam comment a thumbs up and a thumbs down simultaneously?
I had a friend, a very rich friend, that had to have the newest of everything when it came out. He had this in I guess 1999 or so, in the equivalent of what would be a Netbook today. It was in a Sony Vaio machine, so the whole thing was quite cute all-told.
I have a Roland Fantom-XR which has a PCMCIA-to-CF adapter in it right now, the card I have in there is 1 GB. I’m so unnecessarily tempted to find a click-drive and see if my Fantom would boot up from it, instead of the CF, just for fun.
I probably never will, but you know... This video got me really considering it.
Didn’t we have cd-roms in 1999?
PunkHippie1971 CDR aren't rewritable.
And he mentioned CDRW.
PunkHippie1971 yes but they were not conveniently re-writable.
We used ours with Windows CE based hand held PC’s that didn’t have optical drives and whilst a bunch of Hand Held PC 2000 devices had USB ports CE drivers didn’t seem to exist for anything (including f#&@ing mice FFS?!) never mind CD writers.
ROMS yes.
Many people were still a lot of years away from a writer, though
I was a year away from my first CD-R drive, and I don't recall the RWs being all that cheap even then.... I think I still had my Zip drive, but half the disks were screwed.
Talk about timing! I watched this video over breakfast and by chance was given the PC Card version by the afternoon, cool 🤗!
Just hope my one doesn’t die as quick as yours.
Ooh, NiMH battery. That'll be good for about 20 minutes of use.
saturnotaku Ni-MH actually has about the same power per volume as Li-Ion ones in average, just slightly less. The power per weight is it's achiles heel.
Maybe you're confusing with Ni-Cd ones?
Weird. I've never seen or heard of this before. Interesting video as always!
The sound of that Clik drive dying was glorious! I thought you were playing the sound effect of an air horn.
I worked at Iomega during the Clik era. They were **really** proud of the sound it made when you put a disk in. Management wanted it to feel like a clicky ball point pen for some reason. I think that's why they stuck with the name for so long, even in the face of the Click of Death. They were very attached to that idea.
A bit of trivia: the movie Minority Report used removable media shaped like a Clik disk. You can see the little black plastic corners and the overall shape of the thing, but all the actual metal and disk bits were replaced with a transparent piece. The holographic UI effects were then layered onto the transparent portion.
It is a good sound.
Great story about what the thinking was in the office at the time! Thanks for the story friend!
Yes Iomega needs to improve its drives
Honestly the best part of this video is the Windows 95 startup sound, it's euphoric, thank you Clint for leaving that in