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I remember these! I thought at the time that they would for sure take off, but they never did. Even ZIP disks with a similar capacity and less convenient form f

I remember these! I thought at the time that they would for sure take off, but they never did. Even ZIP disks with a similar capacity and less convenient form factor seemed to gain more market traction.

jandrese 7y ago
I recall these being too expensive to be practical. All of these "next generation floppy" techs were living on borrowed time with CD burners and blanks dropping in price and broadband internet slowly starting to appear.
- rbanffy 7y ago
  CD burners were never as convenient as floppies - you simply couldn't immediately save your work, eject and go. While CD burners had a role, what really killed the floppy were the USB sticks and broadband.
  - dehrmann 7y ago
    Nope, but at $1 per blank, it was pain we'd put up with to not spend $10 on a Zip disk.
    - anthk 7y ago
      Not at first.
      - rbanffy 7y ago
        And that after spending a small fortune on the CD writer.
      - jandrese 7y ago
        But fairly shortly (a few years) afterward. Meanwhile Zip disks never came down in price, not even after they were obsolete.
        anthk 7y ago
        In the CD era a lot of people was still using 1.44Mb floppies because of convenience. Burning a disk was "midly" expensive and they could just burn it once, so they were used as bulk backups or bulk media/game sharing, such as pirated games and later, console ROMs.
- codazoda 7y ago
  It was flash, however, that I think killed the Zip drive. Primarily in the form of USB sticks, CF, and SD cards. The digital camera played a big role, as these manufacturers were looking for photo storage solutions and the Zip was too big. Iomega was working on the smaller Clik Drive but couldn't get it released before CF became the major player in cameras. My personal feeling is that the Clik drive was not released because Iomega had just settled the "Click of Death" suit and they wanted the Clik Drive to have a very low, less than 1%, failure rate. It took around two years to bring the failure rate from around 1.5% to 1%. The Zip drive did that reduction work while still shipping product.
  - phire 7y ago
    I remember there being a few years from like 2002 to 2004 where it was clear Zip wasn't the answer (mostly because nobody had a Zip drive) but flash memory was too expensive. Emailing files to yourself and Multi-sesion CD-Rs were popular for two or three years before suddenly everyone had USB drives.
    - jandrese 7y ago
      Those early flash drives were so damn tiny. I still have a 128MB drive from when that was pretty impressive. Those rewritable CDRs never worked that well. The price of regular CDR blanks dropped so hard that it was easier to burn a new disc each time.
      - phire 7y ago
        My first drive was just 16MB; It was so useful. And I never successfully used a rewritable CD, something always seemed to go wrong. I wasn't quite rich enough to burn a fresh disk each time, instead I would append new files to regular CDRs until it was full or I lost it.
lb1lf 7y ago
In Norway, if I remember correctly, these showed up late for the party. Everybody and their dog already had zip drives, and then LS120 shows up, media twice as expensive, not a LS120 drive to be seen. Good luck gaining traction. Then, of course, CD-R happened, and zip drives went the way of the dodo.
dragontamer 7y ago
CD-R and CD-RW drives seem to be the winner from that era. But there were many popular floppy alternatives: Zip, Jazz, SuperDisk, and a few others I probably forgot.
- rbanffy 7y ago
  Iomega had the Bernoulli drives, Zip, Jaz (with a gigabyte!) and Click. There was a bunch of MO formats that were popular in print/ad, a Panasonic phase-change media that looked a lot like MOs. I still have a SyQuest 3.5 magnetic drive.
  - 1996 7y ago
    With the click-of-death problem getting so much attention back then, branding their product Click may have been going a bridge too far.
    - Lammy 7y ago
      Amusingly it was branded "clik!" complete with the exclamation https://www.imaging-resource.com/ACCS/CLIK/CLIK.HTM https://www.imaging-resource.com/ACCS/CLIK/CLIK.HTM
- jordanbeiber 7y ago
  Yeah, the jaz was more of a portable HD alternative. SCSI interface and disk of 1GB spinning at 5400RPM! It was awesome at the time and I remember ”multi booting” my Gateway 2000 with a jaz - RH Linux, Win95 & winNT on separate removable disks.
  - ericd 7y ago
    Did Jaz suffer from the same click-of-death issues as the Zip?
    - jordanbeiber 7y ago
      No, never for me at least. And I used 4 discs for a couple of years as harddrives. The jaz drive/discs were of much higher quality from what you could tell from touch as well as price. :p
Lammy 7y ago
Most people I knew at the time bought this drive to add 1.44MB floppy capability to their iMac and rarely used the SuperDisk format itself.
- abrowne 7y ago
  ... while matching their bondi/blueberry imac: https://www.retrocomputing.co.uk/2019/02/imation-superdisk-ls-120-usb-120mb.html https://www.retrocomputing.co.uk/2019/02/imation-superdisk-l... We used the larger disks for backups, but I don't think we ever bought any more than the first pack of five. And I didn't know anyone else with one, so I couldn't use it to transfer data.

jandrese 7y ago

I recall these being too expensive to be practical. All of these "next generation floppy" techs were living on borrowed time with CD burners and blanks dropping in price and broadband internet slowly starting to appear.

rbanffy 7y ago
CD burners were never as convenient as floppies - you simply couldn't immediately save your work, eject and go. While CD burners had a role, what really killed the floppy were the USB sticks and broadband.
- dehrmann 7y ago
  Nope, but at $1 per blank, it was pain we'd put up with to not spend $10 on a Zip disk.
  - anthk 7y ago
    Not at first.
    - rbanffy 7y ago
      And that after spending a small fortune on the CD writer.
    - jandrese 7y ago
      But fairly shortly (a few years) afterward. Meanwhile Zip disks never came down in price, not even after they were obsolete.
      - anthk 7y ago
        In the CD era a lot of people was still using 1.44Mb floppies because of convenience. Burning a disk was "midly" expensive and they could just burn it once, so they were used as bulk backups or bulk media/game sharing, such as pirated games and later, console ROMs.
codazoda 7y ago
It was flash, however, that I think killed the Zip drive. Primarily in the form of USB sticks, CF, and SD cards. The digital camera played a big role, as these manufacturers were looking for photo storage solutions and the Zip was too big. Iomega was working on the smaller Clik Drive but couldn't get it released before CF became the major player in cameras. My personal feeling is that the Clik drive was not released because Iomega had just settled the "Click of Death" suit and they wanted the Clik Drive to have a very low, less than 1%, failure rate. It took around two years to bring the failure rate from around 1.5% to 1%. The Zip drive did that reduction work while still shipping product.
- phire 7y ago
  I remember there being a few years from like 2002 to 2004 where it was clear Zip wasn't the answer (mostly because nobody had a Zip drive) but flash memory was too expensive. Emailing files to yourself and Multi-sesion CD-Rs were popular for two or three years before suddenly everyone had USB drives.
  - jandrese 7y ago
    Those early flash drives were so damn tiny. I still have a 128MB drive from when that was pretty impressive. Those rewritable CDRs never worked that well. The price of regular CDR blanks dropped so hard that it was easier to burn a new disc each time.
    - phire 7y ago
      My first drive was just 16MB; It was so useful. And I never successfully used a rewritable CD, something always seemed to go wrong. I wasn't quite rich enough to burn a fresh disk each time, instead I would append new files to regular CDRs until it was full or I lost it.

lb1lf 7y ago

In Norway, if I remember correctly, these showed up late for the party. Everybody and their dog already had zip drives, and then LS120 shows up, media twice as expensive, not a LS120 drive to be seen. Good luck gaining traction. Then, of course, CD-R happened, and zip drives went the way of the dodo.

dragontamer 7y ago

CD-R and CD-RW drives seem to be the winner from that era. But there were many popular floppy alternatives: Zip, Jazz, SuperDisk, and a few others I probably forgot.

rbanffy 7y ago
Iomega had the Bernoulli drives, Zip, Jaz (with a gigabyte!) and Click. There was a bunch of MO formats that were popular in print/ad, a Panasonic phase-change media that looked a lot like MOs. I still have a SyQuest 3.5 magnetic drive.
- 1996 7y ago
  With the click-of-death problem getting so much attention back then, branding their product Click may have been going a bridge too far.
  - Lammy 7y ago
    Amusingly it was branded "clik!" complete with the exclamation https://www.imaging-resource.com/ACCS/CLIK/CLIK.HTM https://www.imaging-resource.com/ACCS/CLIK/CLIK.HTM
jordanbeiber 7y ago
Yeah, the jaz was more of a portable HD alternative. SCSI interface and disk of 1GB spinning at 5400RPM! It was awesome at the time and I remember ”multi booting” my Gateway 2000 with a jaz - RH Linux, Win95 & winNT on separate removable disks.
- ericd 7y ago
  Did Jaz suffer from the same click-of-death issues as the Zip?
  - jordanbeiber 7y ago
    No, never for me at least. And I used 4 discs for a couple of years as harddrives. The jaz drive/discs were of much higher quality from what you could tell from touch as well as price. :p

Lammy 7y ago

Most people I knew at the time bought this drive to add 1.44MB floppy capability to their iMac and rarely used the SuperDisk format itself.

abrowne 7y ago
... while matching their bondi/blueberry imac: https://www.retrocomputing.co.uk/2019/02/imation-superdisk-ls-120-usb-120mb.html https://www.retrocomputing.co.uk/2019/02/imation-superdisk-l... We used the larger disks for backups, but I don't think we ever bought any more than the first pack of five. And I didn't know anyone else with one, so I couldn't use it to transfer data.