Zip disks were much more popular. I worked as a computer hardware technician in an independent computer shop in the late 90s, and while I'd heard of the LS-* dr

Zip disks were much more popular. I worked as a computer hardware technician in an independent computer shop in the late 90s, and while I'd heard of the LS-* drives, Zip drives were the only ones I'd worked with. We had an external one on the work bench. CD writers were available at the time, but typically you'd use a CD-R not CD-RW owing to expense, and it was something you'd need to do exclusively, as in not use the computer for anything else. If the machine was too busy multitasking, you'd get a buffer underrun, which would turn the CD-R into a coaster. Zip disks and equivalent were more like floppies in this respect.