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On a similar note, a couple of days ago I bought two factory sealed magneto-optical disks, one 230 MB and the other 640 MB, for 300 yens each. I had never seen
by pezezin 2y ago
On a similar note, a couple of days ago I bought two factory sealed magneto-optical disks, one 230 MB and the other 640 MB, for 300 yens each. I had never seen one in person, and I think that they look really cool in a retrofuturistic sense.
When I was a kid I remember reading and dreaming about all these alternative storage formats: MO, flopticals, Zip drive, LS-120, etc. The idea of a little disk with the capacity of a hundred floppies was amazing, it's a pity that none could replace them.
- rob74 2y agoAs far as I remember the Zip drives came closest... but were held back by being proprietary and therefore relatively expensive. And of course all of these were eventually replaced by USB sticks.
- Tepix 2y agoZip drives got killed by the click of death scandal
- jmisavage 2y agoI put the death of Zip more on CD-Rs getting popular. Even if you didn’t have a writer you could read them. And then UsB thumb drives came in to clean house.
- Cthulhu_ 2y agoBut CD-R and USB drives weren't mutually exclusive in my experience; a lot of PCs couldn't boot off of USB yet and early USB sticks didn't have the same capacity (I believe my first USB stick was 64 MB?). But, burning a CD was more involved, and re-recordable ones were expensive. Some time later we found you can buy spindles of burnable CDs for pennies per disk.
- prmoustache 2y agoMost people didn't care about booting a CD, even more so a custom CD.
- prmoustache 2y agoI think it was a mix of reasons: complexity (you needed scsi or parallel port available, CDR, internet, hard drive capacity increasing and evolution of work policies. Zip drives were fairly expensive so weren't really a solution for archival. CDR and their immutability were more interesting for archival. Zip drives weren't useful for sharing data as they weren't OEM deivces so you wouldn't expect anyone to have the drive and it soon became easier to email files. So basically Zip drives were only useful as an extension of your own hard drive or to share files between 2 computers you owned that were equipped with a zip drive (say home and office). This has been gradually frowned upon by companies so this was only really a thing for people working independently. Additionally in the later years while the size of the usb flash drive could increase constantly, the zip drives had to evolve in parallel with the medias. An early adopter who had to upgrade from zip100 to zip250 then zip750 would have had 3 drives to purchase, even more so because of the click of death while a newer usb2.0 flash drive would work on an old computer with usb1.0 or 1.1 port.
- reginald78 2y agoI think this is probably right. Zip never quite got the penetration needed to take up the mantle of the floppy as far as I remember. And by the time it gained traction the CD burner was coming onto the scene in a big way. The market badly needed a higher capacity floppy like media, 1.44MB was a complete joke by the time floppy drives were killed. But if you had to choose between buying a zip drive or a CD burner the burner was the way to go. A burner was terrible for shuffling a few files around and early burning with janky disks and slow processors was a gamble, but copying games and albums or making mix CDs as well as the superior capacity just left it with broader utility than a zip drive with expensive disks had.
- abrookewood 2y agoOooh ... I had totally forgotten about that! Thanks for the reminder - now I can hear it in my head.
- mkl 2y agoIn my experience, writeable and rewriteable CDs killed Zip drives well before USB drives could hold as much.