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Great Thread (with pictures) of what this warehouse used to sell: https://twitter.com/drahardja/status/982872448906346496 https://twitter.com/drahardja/status/9

Great Thread (with pictures) of what this warehouse used to sell: https://twitter.com/drahardja/status/982872448906346496 https://twitter.com/drahardja/status/982872448906346496

philfrasty 9y ago
damn those iomega jaz & zip drives bring back memories...thanks for sharing
- samstave 9y ago
  Heh, I’ve left quite a number of Jaz and Zip drives at weirdstuff!
- colordrops 9y ago
  bad memories... they were never reliable for me. click of death etc
  - codazoda 9y ago
    The zip drive failure rate was less than 1% and the "click of death" had hundreds of causes in the percentage that failed. You see, the Zip drive had a parked head. When the head came out to read the disk it would "click" as the head left it's dock and came out to the media. If it failed to read the media it would click again as it re-docked. This all happened fairly quickly and was the "click-click" sound you heard when a drive failed for almost any reason. That proved to be a very difficult problem that ultimately led to the class action suit that I believe was the companies demise. It survived in name for a number of years, but really only in name. The lawsuit itself didn't seem to affect the company that much but it affected policy a lot. Their next drive could have been the next big craze. It was ready way before compact flash came along but the company refused to ship it because the failure rate was slightly above 1%. We spent a few years trying to reduce the failure rate by fractions and we all know that a few years is ages is technology.
    - colordrops 9y ago
      Both my friend and I had drives with the click of death problem. It could be a 1 in 10,000 event, or it could be that the rate was higher than 1%. I remember it being a very common problem at the time.
- codazoda 9y ago
  I worked in support there during the Zip drive boom. My first tech job and it was a wild few years.
StillBored 9y ago
Reminds me of the goodwill computer store in Austin. https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/10/29/1823212/welcome-to-the-goodwill-computer-museum-video https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/10/29/1823212/welcome... In the late 1990's they had a lot of "junk", which a couple of the employees curated into a museum of early computing. Then they moved buildings (from where vans autoparts is to the goodwill complex east of 35). The museum was formalized, but they also instituted some kind of "policy" that apparently went along the lines of "if its not in a black PC case put it in the recycling bin" and the guys running the dropoff/collection promptly "recycled" tons of rare stuff that in many cases could have been sold on ebay for 100x what they were making in the computer store itself (queue story of racing there to retrieve a high end 10 year old sun server only to be told it was in the bottom of a dumpster being shipped off to china/wherever to be "recycled"). So the store itself became worthless since it really only sold 3-4 year old PCs for frequently for more than what could be had on a good day at fry's. It stopped being a place to find parts for older machines, which made it effectively useless. A couple years ago they closed down the computer museum too. I remember reading that they sent some of the documentation/etc to UT, some of the hardware to other museums and sold the rest of it on ebay or recycled it.
- tasty_freeze 9y ago
  That place bit me hard. I had a too-big microcomputer collection that came with me from San Jose to Austin in 2004. At first I would drop by Computer Works when I was passing by, but it was almost never open, a bad sign. My wife prevailed on me to reduce my collection, so I thought of them. I had fully work HP-85 (except the tape drive), HP-86, and HP-87 computers, with manuals, disk drives, many ROM options, manuals, and software. It had taken me about five years of haunting ebay and bay area HAMfests to collect it all. When I went to Computer Works, the guy at the register said to donate at the regular Goodwill next door. I was leery, but OK, it is their shop. I drove around the back, told the guy this was donations for the Computer Works and that everything was organized into groups -- hardware/software specific for a given machine was together. I started unloading my car into piles, and on the third or fourth trip I noticed that the receiving guy completely ignored me and had taken all the printed material and chucked it into a huge bin along with all the other random books and magazines they collected. I just about blew a gasket, but I promised my wife I would get rid of it. I came back a few times in subsequent months, and it never showed up in the museum, and it never showed up on their "for sale" section. I assume it all got recycled.

Great Thread (with pictures) of what this warehouse used to sell: https://twitter.com/drahardja/status/982872448906346496 https://twitter.com/drahardja/status/982872448906346496

philfrasty 9y ago

damn those iomega jaz & zip drives bring back memories...thanks for sharing

samstave 9y ago
Heh, I’ve left quite a number of Jaz and Zip drives at weirdstuff!
colordrops 9y ago
bad memories... they were never reliable for me. click of death etc
- codazoda 9y ago
  The zip drive failure rate was less than 1% and the "click of death" had hundreds of causes in the percentage that failed. You see, the Zip drive had a parked head. When the head came out to read the disk it would "click" as the head left it's dock and came out to the media. If it failed to read the media it would click again as it re-docked. This all happened fairly quickly and was the "click-click" sound you heard when a drive failed for almost any reason. That proved to be a very difficult problem that ultimately led to the class action suit that I believe was the companies demise. It survived in name for a number of years, but really only in name. The lawsuit itself didn't seem to affect the company that much but it affected policy a lot. Their next drive could have been the next big craze. It was ready way before compact flash came along but the company refused to ship it because the failure rate was slightly above 1%. We spent a few years trying to reduce the failure rate by fractions and we all know that a few years is ages is technology.
  - colordrops 9y ago
    Both my friend and I had drives with the click of death problem. It could be a 1 in 10,000 event, or it could be that the rate was higher than 1%. I remember it being a very common problem at the time.
codazoda 9y ago
I worked in support there during the Zip drive boom. My first tech job and it was a wild few years.

StillBored 9y ago

Reminds me of the goodwill computer store in Austin. https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/10/29/1823212/welcome-to-the-goodwill-computer-museum-video https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/10/29/1823212/welcome... In the late 1990's they had a lot of "junk", which a couple of the employees curated into a museum of early computing. Then they moved buildings (from where vans autoparts is to the goodwill complex east of 35). The museum was formalized, but they also instituted some kind of "policy" that apparently went along the lines of "if its not in a black PC case put it in the recycling bin" and the guys running the dropoff/collection promptly "recycled" tons of rare stuff that in many cases could have been sold on ebay for 100x what they were making in the computer store itself (queue story of racing there to retrieve a high end 10 year old sun server only to be told it was in the bottom of a dumpster being shipped off to china/wherever to be "recycled"). So the store itself became worthless since it really only sold 3-4 year old PCs for frequently for more than what could be had on a good day at fry's. It stopped being a place to find parts for older machines, which made it effectively useless. A couple years ago they closed down the computer museum too. I remember reading that they sent some of the documentation/etc to UT, some of the hardware to other museums and sold the rest of it on ebay or recycled it.

tasty_freeze 9y ago
That place bit me hard. I had a too-big microcomputer collection that came with me from San Jose to Austin in 2004. At first I would drop by Computer Works when I was passing by, but it was almost never open, a bad sign. My wife prevailed on me to reduce my collection, so I thought of them. I had fully work HP-85 (except the tape drive), HP-86, and HP-87 computers, with manuals, disk drives, many ROM options, manuals, and software. It had taken me about five years of haunting ebay and bay area HAMfests to collect it all. When I went to Computer Works, the guy at the register said to donate at the regular Goodwill next door. I was leery, but OK, it is their shop. I drove around the back, told the guy this was donations for the Computer Works and that everything was organized into groups -- hardware/software specific for a given machine was together. I started unloading my car into piles, and on the third or fourth trip I noticed that the receiving guy completely ignored me and had taken all the printed material and chucked it into a huge bin along with all the other random books and magazines they collected. I just about blew a gasket, but I promised my wife I would get rid of it. I came back a few times in subsequent months, and it never showed up in the museum, and it never showed up on their "for sale" section. I assume it all got recycled.