Whereas with USB sticks all one needed was a USB port. I immediately wanted a stick.
But only a few years later, as you say, USB thumb drives were making Zip drives irrelevant.
I think the network effect was more a question of who had tons of data: for example, all of the graphic design shops had Zip or Jazz drives because they needed to schlep client deliverables around so you could just assume they had the hardware. Most people weren’t generating that much data before digital cameras became common.
What I recall being sold for Mac were FireWire peripherals back in the late 90s and most of the 2000s. By 2000, USB 2.0 was too good to ignore and addressed all the pain points manufacturers had with USB 1.1 being too slow. That's when I remember USB drives finally being practical and mainstream.
Apple's decision to leave out all the other ports meant that a bunch of folks were forced to buy new USB peripherals (and/or adapters), and gave peripheral manufacturers a dedicated market for USB
It seems that even Apple quickly caved in and put FireWire on the G3 iMac when they updated the design to a slot loader in 1999.
I don't have anything against Apple, but USB before the 2000s was pretty bad. It seems weird that people are now thinking otherwise.
Indeed. So bad that no one apart from Apple would have tried to go all-in on it. I doubt things like USB mice and keyboards would ever have happened if Apple didn't give it a kick in the behind
Firewire was indeed a nice addition when that came along, but it always remained the domain of pricey high-bandwidth devices.
Then I got to experience the click of death and the internet connection was bumped to 100Mbit and I didn't need to replace my zip drive.
Edit: Today I use just 2.5" SSDs in the same way. There's a small sata to usb-c adapter where I plug them in without any further enclosure.
I don't even think I've seen a single on here in Russia in the 90s.
5.25 in my fathers company? Sure. 3.5 everywhere else? Da. CDs at some point.
Hell, even minidisc was there (also almost non-existent, I think I know only two people who actually owned a minidisc player).
No sing of Zip.
I think I only saw two computers with ZIP drives in the wild, so to say. Which created its own anti-network effects: if there is no expectation of the other party having a compatible drive, you will either have to do with floppies, or maybe carry an external HDD with you, but you won't use an exotic and expensive format. Pretty much the only plausible use was backup.
I still believe that with a more aggressive price policy, ZIPs could have conquered a lot of territory in the 1990s. But 200/20 USD was just too much money to spend. Not just in the post-Soviet bloc, but almost everywhere in Asia, too. Big markets lost because of the cost, and therefore a chance to entrench the standard worldwide.
I'm not surprised, considering they were expensive. That doesn't mean they weren't popular in the west.
Needing large and Read-Write was the niche than CD-R and CD-RW did much better. Along with CDs in general, they just didn't do much more than span a small temporal gap in value proposition.
T
I guess I was just majorly unlucky. clickclickclickclick*...
...in retrospect as the article states: swept away by CD-rw and USB sticks, but a great technology! There really was a critical gap in "I need to back up _all_ my files or coursework for the semester" or "Wouldn't it be great to be able to fit TEN games on a floppy instead of ONE game on ten floppies?"
It really was a different era!
Floppy disks were tiny and slow
Zip drives in 1995 were around $200 and 100MB disk for about $20
CD-R burners in 1995 were $1000 and blank CD-R were about $15 each
By 1999 CD-R burners were around $125 and blank discs were around $1 and dropping fast. I remember when they were $0.10 for a 700MB disc in the 2000s
There was this, from the same era: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArVid
And I have this for my Amiga, also same era: http://www.hugolyppens.com/VBS.html
First, LTO drives are conceptually simple, but if you've ever opened one up you'll know they are a feat of horribly complex engineering.
Second, they are not a commodity product. Infact thanks to the magic cloud they are even LESS of a commodity product than they were 10 years ago because lots of people have either wholesale moved to the cloud or use S3 for backup.
1 + 2 = Low volume product with lots of parts crammed into it = high manufacturing cost = high price.
The orgs who still use LTO in their infra are the sort of orgs who don't blink at the price tag. The cost of the CTO's farts is probably more than a 5k tape drive.
This is such an odd take to me.
I sold and supported computers in the 1990s. Outside of a few industries, such as desktop publishing, Zip was not popular. The vast majority of computer owners never owned a Zip drive, unlike a floppy or soon to be CDROM.
In fact, I sold far more QIC-80 tape drives for backups than Zip drives.
Zip also didn't vanish overnight, it simple never caught on with most people. However, in the industries that used them, they hung on for a while.
It almost dissapeares overnight once 32MB+ usb drives became common, much more convenenient.
So it seems like to me they had an extremely short window to operate without much competition. CD-Rs being about $15 for a spindle and 6.5x the space was an easy pick.
It was, in a lot of ways, too early. I never had one, and I never missed having one. I had other solutions to the problems when they happened. By the time I had the problem, it was not a cost-effective solution.
I know people can pop up and say that it solved some problems for them, but I think the people who it solved problems for, in proportion to the price, weren't enough of a market. By the time they were, CD burners were a much cheaper solution.
If they were 1/4 the price, it might have been a different story... but the price was pretty fundamental to the tech.
You can't buy success. You can buy initial success, but not long term success. By the standards of such products, Zip was relatively successful, because it did have some people it solved a problem for. It was just a minority of their customer base. Enough to hang on for a while, but not to take over the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuarkXPress
And we'd all have Zip drives and even internal Zip drives reader/writer in our G3. Can be seen on the picture here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Macintosh_G3
They were big indeed and I'd say huge in the publishing industry. Then the CD writers and then DVD writers began to rule to earth.
iamtedd•1h ago
Similarly, articles just gloss right over the "click of death" without any technical explanation of what goes wrong. Why were these drives and/or media so prone to failure?
There's nothing new in this article.
masklinn•1h ago
Improvement in production processes and materials (e.g. magnetic coatings) allowing smaller tracks and smaller more precisely positioned heads. The 3 1/2 floppy dates back to 1983, the high-density 1.44MB to 1986, the Zip drive was released in 1994.
A “super high density” 20 MB floppy had already been attempted in 1990, and the LS-120, which had the exact same dimensions as a 3.5” floppy (and could read those), launched in 1996, so it was not really exceptional at 6 doubling in 8 years from the 1.44MB floppy.
Also it was expensive, part of that was the lower scale and lack of competition but the increased production requirements were also a factor, Zip drives and media had tighter tolerances.
The click of death was because when the head got misaligned the drive would return it to the home position, if part of the drive had failed the head would never realign so the drive would keep trying, producing a characteristic clicking sound. HDDs can develop the same, but it’s less common than it was on Zip drives. The tighter tolerance were most likely a factor, it was more likely for a zip to age out of tolerance and develop terminal misalignment.
aggakake•1h ago
wzdd•1h ago
gugagore•46m ago
A related technology with a name that already answers your question.
LeCompteSftware•4m ago
Wikipedia says there was a serious attempt to standardize a 20mb floppy in 1990 which fell apart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk#High-capacity It's really not the case that Zip made some great leap forward; 15 years of technology's steady march didn't fully trickle down to consumer hardware because of compatibility issues between competing manufacturers.