5 ms·

1.44 MB lived too long, yet the floppy died earlier than it should have died. Without the power of IBM to dictate a standard, we couldn't increase capacity. We

by tropo 7y ago

1.44 MB lived too long, yet the floppy died earlier than it should have died. Without the power of IBM to dictate a standard, we couldn't increase capacity. We had so many incompatible choices. We had a minor bump to 2.88 MB and the 20 MB Floptical and the 120 MB SuperDisk, all fighting for market share. The 100 MB Zip disk almost succeeded, but then the click-of-death and Iomega's foolish switch to the incompatible Jaz drive put a stop to that. In a saner world, the 240 MB LS-240 would have been the last floppy. It didn't help that floppy quality took a nosedive around 1994. Buyers went by price, and then concluded that floppies were unreliable. A few years after the floppy quality went bad, the same happened for the drives. Floppies are now remembered for being unreliable, but that wasn't always the case. They were quite reliable around 1993.

smacktoward 7y ago
Iomega (the makers of Zip/Jaz/etc.) really was an epic case of mismanagement. They had the future of storage seemingly locked up, and then proceeded to fumble it all away. I wish somebody had written a book about why they made the (extremely poor) decisions they did.
- mrguyorama 7y ago
  That book always has been, and always will be a single word: "Money"
  - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
    Presumably, they stood to make much more money long term if their standards hadn't died.
  - ASalazarMX 7y ago
    I've read it. Time to update my GoodReads profile.
- ASalazarMX 7y ago
  What were their mistakes? My impression is that it wasn't practical. My impression is that they were seen as fragile, people feared losing one was like losing whole boxes of regular floppies. A single floppy was fragile, so you made backups of it, but backing up a ZIP disk was slower and impractical because they were more expensive compared to burning CDs.
  - smacktoward 7y ago
    The height of the Zip disk's popularity was in the mid-'90s, when CD burners were still way too expensive for the consumer market. To the best of my knowledge, Iomega's big mistakes were skimping on quality control, which led to the infamous "click of death" scandal that killed the Zip disk's reputation; and trying to build on the early success of Zip by rolling out multiple new products in a rush like the Jaz and Clik drives, none of which were the slightest bit compatible with any of the others (including Zip). It probably didn't help matters that Iomega also became an early case study in how the entry of individual investors in the market could have disorienting effects, as Iomega stock became extremely hot in online communities focused on the then-quite-new individual-investor market, particularly The Motley Fool (see https://www.deseretnews.com/article/491232/FOOLS-RUSH-IN-SEND-IOMEGA-STOCK-SOARING.html https://www.deseretnews.com/article/491232/FOOLS-RUSH-IN-SEN...). The Fool's founders tapped Iomega as one of their highly recommended "Rule Breakers," and there were people on the Motley Fool message boards who were so convinced that Iomega was The Next Big Thing that they called themselves "Iomegans" (!), preaching the Gospel of Iomega with quasi-religious fervor. All that hype drove the price of Iomega stock to dizzying, unsustainable heights. All of which makes me wonder in retrospect how connected the bad management decisions and the stock pumping were; it's not hard to imagine managers, confronted by staff with big internal problems, pointing at the stock and saying "if we're doing so badly, why does it keep going up?" (The Fools sort of apologized for their role in all that in a book they published in 2000, after the Iomega bubble had popped; see https://books.google.com/books?id=3TDjULa4nO4C&lpg=PA148&ots=i2e4V-9ewP&dq=iomega%20motley%20fool&pg=PA148#v=onepage&q=iomega%20motley%20fool&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=3TDjULa4nO4C&lpg=PA148&ots.... But it couldn't have comforted their readers much to learn in that same passage that they had cashed out half their position in Iomega in 1997, earning a 650 percent return.)
- z2 7y ago
  While I don't remember a single punchline on management, their media was rather expensive at a time when affordable CD-RW drives and media basically pulled the floor from under them. The response was kind of expected--after flailing around on existing storage products, they released a branded 'ZipCD 650' drive to salvage what they could of the market, while trying to hide that it was in fact an overpriced CD-RW drive that used plain CR-R/RW discs. In retrospect, it seems really hard to keep iterating on the next proprietary Zip/Jaz drive technology as a single company when your competition is basically everyone else who are collectively working on portable storage with wider adoption rates.
  - tracker1 7y ago
    They didn't license the technology under reasonable terms, for the most part is what killed them. Even up against CD/DVD, most would rather have a zip100 or zip250 disc that was more reusable. IIRC, there was some licensing for disc mfg, but there were price/licensing restrictions in place. If they'd licensed disks at say $1, and the drives at $10, and let other companies build compatible products, it would have lived a lot longer and they may have even influenced the transition to USB thumb drives. I worked in 2nd level phone support at one time, but had no insight into anything the company did. Aside: the Jazz drive was effectively a detachable internal drive, where the disks came out. A damaged drive could damage the disks, and damaged disks could damage the drive. When an RMA happened, I'd usually do both. In the end they had some really good engineering, and a lot of missed opportunities.
  - CydeWeys 7y ago
    From everything I've heard about it, the Jaz drive was an unmitigated failure caused by bad hardware choices (basically, the "disk" contained hard drive platters and the drive contained the rest of the hard drive mechanism, and you'd insert the one into the other!!). It was also much too expensive. If they'd never embarked on that ill-fated idea, and instead continue to put all of their wood behind zip drives (and maintaining compatibility), they could've done better. I agree that licensing would've helped a lot. The zip disks were simply too expensive, and they always felt like a proprietary format in a way that 3.5" floppies did not. I was only a teenager at the time but even I was thinking "So wait, this one company is the only manufacturer? Seems niche, not the guaranteed next thing."
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  That awkward transition period away from floppies happened while I was in high school. I remember what a nightmare it was until things finally standardized on the USB flash drive, and then soon after, on nothing physical at all (i.e. file transfer over Internet). I remember zip disks being around. The disks were too expensive and the drives, especially so. I used a disk or two at school but never bought one for myself. We had a server at school we could upload/download files to (or just log into directly) so there was never much point. I also remember CD-RWs being terribly unreliable, and sufficiently costlier than a one-use CD-R that basically no one ever used them. I certainly didn't. What a mess of thrown-away plastic all those CD-Rs were (and remember how if you used the computer for anything else while it was burning and it ran out of buffer the CD-R was ruined?). It certainly felt like a regression from the earlier days of rewritable disks.
- oso2k 7y ago
  LGR did some videos on Iomega. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pBhEaMp8mw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pBhEaMp8mw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4hQeWtkTC8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4hQeWtkTC8
velosol 7y ago
> In a saner world, the 240 MB LS-240 would have been the last floppy. Years ago I longed for an LS-120 but by the time I had the money a CD writer was the better deal. I occasionally look at eBay for LS-120s just for fun but I now have a new unicorn to search for and one that didn't even come out in the US - the LS-240. Thank you for a new bit of nostalgia!
- hakfoo 7y ago
  I liked LS-120s because they were IDE and the last generation or two of PC mainboards with a real floppy controller, the controller, or the BIOS, only supported one drive. So with the LS-120, you could have a Phenom II with the same 3.5/5.25 dual-floppy capability as your old 386SX. Bought like four of them in external cases from my university's sale-of-scrap-goods dealer. They're just IDE units with a little adapter board to either USB or some weird propriatery connector.
jdofaz 7y ago
I saw quite a few 120MB Super Disk drives back in the day, I don’t know if I once saw a Super Disk. They were all used as 1.44MB floppy drives for the early iMacs.
- xellisx 7y ago
  Yeah I owned a drive, but never the lS120 disks. It read 1.44s faster though.
- DrScump 7y ago
  Superdiscs weren't difficult to get at all. I had a Panasonic (?) digital camera that had a Superdisc drive inside. Pictures you took would be written to whatever disc you had inside (a regular 1.44mb would fill quickly). There was an adapter so you could use the camera itself as an external drive. I still use some pictures from that camera in ebay listings, 15 years later.

by tropo 7y ago

smacktoward 7y ago

Iomega (the makers of Zip/Jaz/etc.) really was an epic case of mismanagement. They had the future of storage seemingly locked up, and then proceeded to fumble it all away. I wish somebody had written a book about why they made the (extremely poor) decisions they did.

mrguyorama 7y ago
That book always has been, and always will be a single word: "Money"
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  Presumably, they stood to make much more money long term if their standards hadn't died.
- ASalazarMX 7y ago
  I've read it. Time to update my GoodReads profile.
ASalazarMX 7y ago
What were their mistakes? My impression is that it wasn't practical. My impression is that they were seen as fragile, people feared losing one was like losing whole boxes of regular floppies. A single floppy was fragile, so you made backups of it, but backing up a ZIP disk was slower and impractical because they were more expensive compared to burning CDs.
- smacktoward 7y ago
  The height of the Zip disk's popularity was in the mid-'90s, when CD burners were still way too expensive for the consumer market. To the best of my knowledge, Iomega's big mistakes were skimping on quality control, which led to the infamous "click of death" scandal that killed the Zip disk's reputation; and trying to build on the early success of Zip by rolling out multiple new products in a rush like the Jaz and Clik drives, none of which were the slightest bit compatible with any of the others (including Zip). It probably didn't help matters that Iomega also became an early case study in how the entry of individual investors in the market could have disorienting effects, as Iomega stock became extremely hot in online communities focused on the then-quite-new individual-investor market, particularly The Motley Fool (see https://www.deseretnews.com/article/491232/FOOLS-RUSH-IN-SEND-IOMEGA-STOCK-SOARING.html https://www.deseretnews.com/article/491232/FOOLS-RUSH-IN-SEN...). The Fool's founders tapped Iomega as one of their highly recommended "Rule Breakers," and there were people on the Motley Fool message boards who were so convinced that Iomega was The Next Big Thing that they called themselves "Iomegans" (!), preaching the Gospel of Iomega with quasi-religious fervor. All that hype drove the price of Iomega stock to dizzying, unsustainable heights. All of which makes me wonder in retrospect how connected the bad management decisions and the stock pumping were; it's not hard to imagine managers, confronted by staff with big internal problems, pointing at the stock and saying "if we're doing so badly, why does it keep going up?" (The Fools sort of apologized for their role in all that in a book they published in 2000, after the Iomega bubble had popped; see https://books.google.com/books?id=3TDjULa4nO4C&lpg=PA148&ots=i2e4V-9ewP&dq=iomega%20motley%20fool&pg=PA148#v=onepage&q=iomega%20motley%20fool&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=3TDjULa4nO4C&lpg=PA148&ots.... But it couldn't have comforted their readers much to learn in that same passage that they had cashed out half their position in Iomega in 1997, earning a 650 percent return.)
z2 7y ago
While I don't remember a single punchline on management, their media was rather expensive at a time when affordable CD-RW drives and media basically pulled the floor from under them. The response was kind of expected--after flailing around on existing storage products, they released a branded 'ZipCD 650' drive to salvage what they could of the market, while trying to hide that it was in fact an overpriced CD-RW drive that used plain CR-R/RW discs. In retrospect, it seems really hard to keep iterating on the next proprietary Zip/Jaz drive technology as a single company when your competition is basically everyone else who are collectively working on portable storage with wider adoption rates.
- tracker1 7y ago
  They didn't license the technology under reasonable terms, for the most part is what killed them. Even up against CD/DVD, most would rather have a zip100 or zip250 disc that was more reusable. IIRC, there was some licensing for disc mfg, but there were price/licensing restrictions in place. If they'd licensed disks at say $1, and the drives at $10, and let other companies build compatible products, it would have lived a lot longer and they may have even influenced the transition to USB thumb drives. I worked in 2nd level phone support at one time, but had no insight into anything the company did. Aside: the Jazz drive was effectively a detachable internal drive, where the disks came out. A damaged drive could damage the disks, and damaged disks could damage the drive. When an RMA happened, I'd usually do both. In the end they had some really good engineering, and a lot of missed opportunities.
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  From everything I've heard about it, the Jaz drive was an unmitigated failure caused by bad hardware choices (basically, the "disk" contained hard drive platters and the drive contained the rest of the hard drive mechanism, and you'd insert the one into the other!!). It was also much too expensive. If they'd never embarked on that ill-fated idea, and instead continue to put all of their wood behind zip drives (and maintaining compatibility), they could've done better. I agree that licensing would've helped a lot. The zip disks were simply too expensive, and they always felt like a proprietary format in a way that 3.5" floppies did not. I was only a teenager at the time but even I was thinking "So wait, this one company is the only manufacturer? Seems niche, not the guaranteed next thing."
CydeWeys 7y ago
That awkward transition period away from floppies happened while I was in high school. I remember what a nightmare it was until things finally standardized on the USB flash drive, and then soon after, on nothing physical at all (i.e. file transfer over Internet). I remember zip disks being around. The disks were too expensive and the drives, especially so. I used a disk or two at school but never bought one for myself. We had a server at school we could upload/download files to (or just log into directly) so there was never much point. I also remember CD-RWs being terribly unreliable, and sufficiently costlier than a one-use CD-R that basically no one ever used them. I certainly didn't. What a mess of thrown-away plastic all those CD-Rs were (and remember how if you used the computer for anything else while it was burning and it ran out of buffer the CD-R was ruined?). It certainly felt like a regression from the earlier days of rewritable disks.
oso2k 7y ago
LGR did some videos on Iomega. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pBhEaMp8mw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pBhEaMp8mw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4hQeWtkTC8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4hQeWtkTC8

velosol 7y ago

> In a saner world, the 240 MB LS-240 would have been the last floppy. Years ago I longed for an LS-120 but by the time I had the money a CD writer was the better deal. I occasionally look at eBay for LS-120s just for fun but I now have a new unicorn to search for and one that didn't even come out in the US - the LS-240. Thank you for a new bit of nostalgia!

hakfoo 7y ago
I liked LS-120s because they were IDE and the last generation or two of PC mainboards with a real floppy controller, the controller, or the BIOS, only supported one drive. So with the LS-120, you could have a Phenom II with the same 3.5/5.25 dual-floppy capability as your old 386SX. Bought like four of them in external cases from my university's sale-of-scrap-goods dealer. They're just IDE units with a little adapter board to either USB or some weird propriatery connector.

jdofaz 7y ago

I saw quite a few 120MB Super Disk drives back in the day, I don’t know if I once saw a Super Disk. They were all used as 1.44MB floppy drives for the early iMacs.

xellisx 7y ago
Yeah I owned a drive, but never the lS120 disks. It read 1.44s faster though.
DrScump 7y ago
Superdiscs weren't difficult to get at all. I had a Panasonic (?) digital camera that had a Superdisc drive inside. Pictures you took would be written to whatever disc you had inside (a regular 1.44mb would fill quickly). There was an adapter so you could use the camera itself as an external drive. I still use some pictures from that camera in ebay listings, 15 years later.