Why Zip drives dominated the 90s, then vanished almost overnight

(xda-developers.com)

8 points | by y1n0 18 hours ago ago

6 comments

  • apothegm 17 hours ago

    Dominated? They were pretty niche. Most people just kept using floppies, or eventually CD-Rs.

    • f30e3dfed1c9 14 hours ago

      I don't know what most people did. I know that the business I worked for then needed to transfer relatively large sets of files on a regular basis. We owned hundreds of zip disks.

      This was after Syquest disks and before CDs. At the time we used zip disks, CD burners were still very expensive. Later, when CD burner prices came down, we switched to those. Still later, mostly FTP.

      • apothegm 6 hours ago

        Fair. At the time I wasn’t working in corporate.

    • serf 14 hours ago

      they were pretty dominant in a lot of sectors. AutoDesk products pre-cloud produced large files (well, they still do, but transport is no longer an issue.) -- so zip drives were pretty ubiquitous in design until CD-R.

  • 15 hours ago
    [deleted]
  • two_handfuls 18 hours ago

    Yup. Once your drive failed (which happened to most people), you never bought from them again.