• Garbanzo@lemmy.worldEnglish
    36·
    6 months ago

    The community college near me had zip drives on the library computers. I bought one primarily so I could download Netscape there and bring it home because doing it that way was faster than using our dialup connection.

  • Daqu@lemm.ee
    29·
    6 months ago

    click - your data is lost

    I liked them anyways. The IDE drives were fast and cheap, CD-R was still too expensive.

    • don@lemm.ee
      10·
      6 months ago

      I still remember getting my first TDK burner, and going through mad numbers of CD-Rs due to failed writes. Those will always be the days.

    • reddig33@lemmy.world
      14·
      6 months ago

      It could’ve been a great computer storage medium, but it took far too long to be sold as such. By the time minidisc was being marketed as floppy/zip replacement, cd-Rs were a thing.

      • Aggravationstation@feddit.uk
        16·
        6 months ago

        But minidiscs were so much cooler. They came in neon colours and you felt like a super hacker man when you clunked them into a player and used them for storing data rather than music.

    • don@lemm.ee
      8·
      6 months ago

      IOMEGA! IOMEGA! ONE ZIP DISK TO RULE THEM ALL! ALL SHALL BOW!

      But yeah. I may be nostalgic, but MiniDiscs were GOAT af, let’s be real.

  • Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    17·
    6 months ago

    Mine was password protected and had Bulma’s boobs and incredibly confusing feelings stored on it

  • LittleTarsier@lemmy.ca
    15·
    6 months ago

    Omg I’ve heard USB sticks be called “zip drives” before. I had no idea they were something entirely their own!

  • Diplomjodler@lemmy.world
    14·
    6 months ago

    I once spent weeks trying to get a scanner, a printer and a zip drive to work on a single parallel port. Needless to say, it was a fool’s errand. I ended up buying an ISA card with two extra parallel ports which after fiddling endlessly with interrupts kind of worked. Ah, the good old days. Now get off my lawn, damn kids!

  • FrostyCaveman@lemm.ee
    10·
    6 months ago

    Used to see Iomega stuff advertised in PC magazines back in the day. Always wanted them but was impossible for me as a child to acquire that kind of hardware

  • ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.de
    8·
    6 months ago

    A company named “100MEGA Distribution”, a Czech computer parts vendor (incorporated in 1994) has one of these framed at the reception.

  • sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip
    7·
    6 months ago

    I think I used one of these things to just do a full directory copy of Civ2 and a few other games that were somehow installed on one computer in one classroom and bring them to my eMachine at home.

  • Chefdano3@lemm.eeEnglish
    6·
    6 months ago

    I remember the tv ad that ran for them. It was a like a Mission Impossible style data heist and a dude zipped his files to the drive and jumped out the plane before it could be hijacked or some such.

  • psvrh@lemmy.ca
    6·
    6 months ago

    They were a nice alternative to the Syquest and Bernoulli disks we were using at the time–inasmuch as they were cheaper and I didn’t need to worry if the person I was going to send a file to had a 44, 88, 135 or 270 MB SyQuest: almost everyone had a Zip drive.

    …but the click-of-death hurt them, and the ubiquity of CDRs and USB thumb drives was the real end.

  • don@lemm.ee
    6·
    6 months ago

    Fuck yes I do. I was really fortunate in that I never got the click of death, and so a straight hundo at the time was future tech now. I was using tech no one else around me understood, so it was rad as fuck for me. I miss my Zip disks.