Remember Zip Disks? - Failed Storage Tech

[@fen4554]

Worked in graphics around 2000. The zip disk was a godsend. PSDs being set up for press were 30 or 40 megs, sometimes a lot more. Before zip disk the best alternatives were a SCSI external drive the size of a laptop, or using an LZH split archive across dozens of diskettes. Eventually FTP took over but there was a dark time.

[@ccricers]

I used Zip disks for my job at uni when we were digitizing old video tapes. The department also used Jaz drives for archiving

[@sonanddadgamepad]

I remember those dark days too *shudder*

[@williamjones7163]

I went through the whole ZIP product life cycle. Write/rewrite CD'S sent ZIP down the drain. A 100 pack of writable CD'S cost the same as a single 250mb ZIP disk.

[@BenHeckHacks]

My first graphics job had an internal SCSI Zip on my computer. Super useful! Zip was the perfect solution between floppies and thumb drives.

[@theantipope4354]

The big downside of Zip disks was the infamous Click of Death.

[@TheArtofGuitar]

The "Click of Death" still haunts my dreams.

[@Just_Pele]

My grandfather had a Cartrivision TV combo, and you COULD rewind the cartridges, but you had to do it all by hand with a fat, flat-blade screwdriver, and there was a very real risk of damaging the tape or the lock mechanism (and it took forever). If you DID break the cartridge you had to buy it, and they were $50 ($400+ today) and the rental service could drop you as a customer. Good times.

[@medkow7415]

VHS rentals could cost you $100+ dollars to replace if you lost them in the original days of video rental. My worked at Rite Aid when they rented VHS tapes and they all add price tags on them.

[@majestyk3337]

@@medkow7415 Yup, my mom bought a VHS tape (The Train) for my dad, back in the 80's, and it cost over $90.

[@beaudavis3808]

Even Beta was better than that.

[@Charlesb88]

Saying formats like Zip “failed” is like saying Floppy Discs, CRT Monitors, Data compact cassettes, daisy wheel & dot matrix printers, dial-up modems, game & software ROM cartridges, and so forth failed because they became outdated technology superseded by better tech or already existing tech that simply became cheaper for the average consumer. Floppy discs where superseded by CD and DVD-R/RW and Flash thumb drives, CRT minors by cheaper LCD monitors, Data Cassettes by cheaper floppy drives & discs, Daisy Wheel and Dot matrix printers by cheaper ink jet and laser printers, Dial-up modems by DSL, cable, satellite, and other high speed internet options, and ROM cartridges by Optical media. A failed tech is one that few if any adopt (i.e. it’s not even a niche product) and it leaves the market after a few years at most. If it succeeds in Japan/Asia and/or Europe but failed in the U.S. it is not an overall failure as success can come from countries outside the U.S. as hard as that can be for my fellow Americans to remember.

[@gxc90]

Also Iomega had the Jaz drive for up to 1 GB of storage. However, what was the reason for the Imation super disk being phased out, since it was able to hold 250 MB + it was backwards compatible to the HD Floppy disk?

[@Charlesb88]

@@gxc90 The original 120MB SuperDisk version found some niche use in the server market where backwards compatibility with 1.44MB floppies was useful and because it could hold a entire *nix OS (useful for setting up new server machines) but failed with consumers largely due to it coming out two years after ZIp (and backwards capatability with 1.44MB floppies not being a big enough selling point vs sticking separate ZIp and floppy drives). By the time they increased the SuperDisk capacity to 250MB, the CD-R/RW had come down in price enough that a measly 250MB was no longer.such a big del vs the 700MB+ CD-R/RW capacity. For Unix/Linux server admins that could hold just about any open-source Unix/Linux distro then currently being developed. With Cloud storage, fast broadband, thumb flash drives and memory cards, and such physical storage is no longer that element except for accessing older archived data and commercial software/games which is why most removable media drives like floppy and optical drives on new pre-built computers are hard to find the days (outside of maybe a SD card slot).

[@SkepticalCaveman]

Game cartridges are not "outdated". Hundred of millions of cartridges are sold every year. It's a better option than storing games on a Micro-sd card that can be wiped without difficulty. Cartridges lasts forever, that's why peole still can play 40 year old games today with the original cartridge.

[@joshjones5172]

floppy drives were not only invented a decade before the zip drive, they were still being produced after the zip drive died, your nostalgia for junk tech is strong... Literally everything you listed had a longer run time than zip drives LOL

[@SpiritmanProductions]

Great comment. And +1 for spelling superseded right. A rarity. ;-)

[@evanrhildreth]

True story: At my university (Waterloo) in the mid '90s, the network storage quotas allotted to students was smaller than needed to do our assignments. Some of my classmates emailed their work to themselves as attachments (email had no quotas) but I got myself an parallel port Zip drive that I hauled daily to the labs. For one assignment, the lab computer didn't have enough RAM, so I ran a virtual memory SWAP FILE on a PARALLEL PORT 100MB Zip drive!

[@dinkarfowkar999]

You were from France (coz we are studying French revolution and I remember this place as its name is funny)

[@sushimshah2896]

And now I can use programs on the EngLab remotely from another continent by signing into the university VPN. Btw almost finished my master's from UW remotely! (bloody IRCC still haven't granted my study permit)

[@ffmfg]

Ha! I see your swap file on LPT zip drive and raise you a class (like 10-15 machines) of network-booted "workstations" that booted from and swapped to a Netware share over the same 10mbit network (I'm pretty sure that was before mainstream switches, they were either on one coax or plugged in a hub). We once had a demo/class on AutoCAD there, that was so hilariously slow... Like you execute a command and then wait minutes for screen to redraw, because of all machines heavy swapping over the network.

[@daleatkin8927]

@@ffmfg was this in Waterloo? In the physics building? If so I used to love those computers. Why? Because no one knew how to use them and as soon as you did, you got pretty much exclusive access to them, and could get work done, even when the lab was stupid busy.

[@hdrenginedevelopment7507]

That had to be painfully slow swap filing off the parallel port version. The IDE/SCSI versions were actually pretty decently fast for their time.

[@TonksMoriarty]

Never forget that Sony had the gall to call the PSP's disc mediun "Universal Media Disc"

[@alfiegordon9013]

To be fair, it did carry lots of different types of media, which I think was the intended implication

[@Setsunone]

I had games, music and video on UMDs so it actually wad universal 😁

[@Spentbrass42]

if im correct the sony mini disc is basically a precursor to the PSP's UMD since mini disc didnt catch on

[@zero_gravity5861]

ah yes, they had the frenchman

[@TeK_l33t]

@@Spentbrass42 minidisc did catch on, but only in Japan, they stopped making those only in 2013

[@mikeselectricstuff]

SD is not an open standard - manufacturers need tp pay licensing fees to the SD card organisation, and only members can get access to the full specs.

[@brocktechnology]

Your completely right of course but MMC for the win.

[@mariomunoz525]

you're right, but i believe he might have meant open standard as in adopted by most manufacturers. probably just poor choice of wording from the writer. should have said more widely adopted

[@james8449100]

Splitting hairs

[@holl0r]

Open Standard doesn't mean you can use it for free (as manufacturer). Nor that it hasn't patented parts.

[@joshjones5172]

The SD Association (SDA) is a non-profit organization, they do not charge licensing fees. Early versions of the SD specification were available under a NDA, prohibiting development of open-source drivers. However, the system was eventually reverse-engineered and free software drivers provided access to SD cards not using DRM. Subsequent to the release of most open-source drivers, the SDA provided a simplified version of the specification under a less restrictive license helping reduce some incompatibility issues. The fees you are talking about are regarding numerous patents and trademarks, not the actual SD industry standard.

[@ldchappell1]

Tech failure and obsolescence are two different things. Segway, Apple Lisa, Google Glass, Web Van, Movie Pass are examples of tech failures. Fax machines, VCRs, Analog television, 8 track tapes are obsolete tech.

[@Jay-Dee]

But what do the hipsters at LTT know...

[@jesperkoch6479]

Try telling the german government about Fax machines being "obsolete".

[@ldchappell1]

@@jesperkoch6479 Doesn't matter how ubiquitous these fax machines are with the Germans. Compared to email tools and other online tools, stand alone fax machines are ineffective, they waste energy and can have security issues. People use obsolete equipment everyday. Since I don't have a desktop computer anymore, I use my 42 year old IBM Selectric II typewriter. You can still buy the ribbon cartridges.

[@jdatlas4668]

@@ldchappell1 just to defend the country I went to university in, Germany isn't that bad with fax machines. Okay, they are, but Japan is way worse :p

[@ldchappell1]

@@jdatlas4668 I have nothing against Germany. I spent 13 years of my childhood (1963-1976) being raised by a wonderful German foster mother who taught me so much about life.

[@na195097]

I was an engineering student in the late '90s. Zip drives were a necessity. They were hard to find, but once they became USB, everyone had them.

[@nysaea]

Hell, I remember zip disks being ubiquitous in graphics well into the 2000's. It was very rare to not find a printing service business that wouldn't accept zips as a medium until about 2010 or so. Maybe there are geographical variations, but calling it failed storage tech is a misnomer.

[@beaudavis3808]

I remember having one connected to my computer for a while. Not a single bit of surprise, I do not have it anymore.

[@SerBallister]

Wasn't the pre-USB Zip drive using the parallel port or some other obscure connection ?

[@nysaea]

@@SerBallister zip drives were indeed available in both parallel and SCSI versions. Both were pretty common back then.

[@beaudavis3808]

@@SerBallister They may have been, but I definitely do not remember because I wasn't in computers today as I am.

[@mattsword41]

wouldn't call zip 'failed' - they filled their niche for their time - it's just tech moved on. They lasted quite a long time. Also, Fujifilm used to license and make zip discs - not just iomega? Sony Memory Stick - now that really was crap ;)

[@ptb1ptb2]

I used zip disks a whole bunch, back in the day. We had two computers in use, and weren't very network savvy so they were useful. Frequent backups onto multiple storage systems was a must. Zip disks did usually let you know when they were going to die, though, which was nice. :P

[@kevingallant8073]

It's failed in the same way floppy disks failed. They no longer serve a legitimate use for modern equipment.

[@mattsword41]

@@ptb1ptb2 had one built into my dell laptop for university pre wifi era. Used zips to transfer half-life mods from the uni networked computer labs to my machine. :)

[@PcVgLife]

I agree. I think the format SuperDisk (LS-120) came out at about the same time as Zip. That's probably considered more of a failure. ZIPs were everywhere.

[@scottjohnson5415]

They did fail quite frequently along with Jazz drives. It was called the "click of death" where the read/write head failed, sometimes damaging the disk in the process.

[@40yr.Old.Nerdin]

Bruh. I remember literally fantasizing about the idea of having a ZIP drive on my computer as a kid. No idea why....But that's just how hard off we were for portable storage back then. I'd browse the Staples flyers looking a zip drives like a kid in a toy store. 🤦‍♂😅

[@highpath4776]

Fitted one internal to mine and have 100 and 250 mb externals too. goodness knows if I will ever find the disks and hook them up to the laptop

[@triadwarfare]

Yeah, it's kind of a fetish for us tech kids that love the latest tech, but couldn't get one because you don't have an income

[@spasmonaut10]

I tried the USB model when it was first launched back when Windows 95c "supported" USB and oh man that was rough. USB was not what it is today within Windows. I think I was entering high school then and felt like a real hotshot having a Zip drive. I could work on my school projects and take them all on a single disk back and forth to school where we had a few Macs with Zip drives... But alas, BSOD out the rear...returned it to Best Buy and took home a parallel port model in the boring solid dark blue case (at least it had a window and fun LED status lights!) and while it choked the CPU harder and you weren't going to be printing and transferring files at the same time with much joy, it did work noticeably better. Shame about the USB model since the case was translucent to appeal to the iMac craze that was happening with everything "i" being launched with translucent, colored cases. I think I contemplated taking a second swing at it when Win98SE came about but I by that time CDR/CDRW had landed and kind of killed the purpose that Zip had served at that point. I think I amassed a whopping collection of about almost a dozen or so 100 MB disks, most were Fuji and just a couple Iomegas that I still have to this day, along with the drive. I plugged it into one of my older PCs that came with an IO shield with the ribbon cable for the parallel port header and it's running PopOS and sure enough the drive worked just like it always did. I think I lost one disk to hardware failure over the course of using them. I actually extracted everything I could from the disks that I still have that I could locate and put it all on my NAS for archiving... I wanted to try out the Clik disks (anyone remember those? I think THOSE deserved a bigger mention than Zip considering Zip was definitely a far more successful venture) but never had the reason/means to use them and alas they vanished before I could ever play with one.

[@Helladamnleet]

I remember figuring out you could split zip files into 1.2mb chunks and going to friends' houses with like 15-20 floppy discs

[@StarkRG]

I'm rather confused by LTT's idea of failure when the first two "failures" were two of the biggest storage media of their sector at the time. Zip, in particular, was the single most popular removable storage media for several years there. Yes, they were eventually superceded, but that's just how technology works. The last one certainly seems to fit the bill, though. I think MD-Data would be considered a failure even though the music format was a resounding success in Japan and Europe (and still not exactly a failure in the US either).

[@lovelessclips433]

I agree with you.

[@bambua]

We used the hell out of Zip drives in college before USB keys became more available. An internal Zip drive and a few disks at the time was actually cheaper then a good size USB key. I could get an OEM zip drive for 45-50 bucks.

[@Evolatic]

Agreed. Zip was not a failed media format.

[@karenelizabeth1590]

Yeah, I didn't have a ZIP disk but I wanted one soooo bad. For a long time, there was nothing like them until CD-RW. To say that Iomega ZIP was a failure isn't really accurate.

[@Reinforce_Zwei]

He's defining failure as "Not used today" because he's canadian and doesn't understand English very well.

[@YourreelmemoriesAu]

I worked in a CD duplication & data conversation bureau in the 90’s. I remember we had to buy a Zip drive because our clients would send in artwork & content on them. They were definitely popular for a few years I remember.

[@Groovewonder2]

I don't remember the name, but Technology Connections did a piece on DISPOSABLE dvds that came in air-sealed packaging and would oxidize their surface after 48 hours of air exposure. I highly recommend doing a piece on failed disposable tech like this, especially given the recent ramping of ewaste concerns coming along with R2R.

[@D3VINJ]

He better see this...

[@5roundsrapid263]

“Flexplay”.

[@andrewtyler7648]

The name was "Flex Play"

[@sylviam6535]

On one hand, it created e-waste, but on the other hand it saved transport by not having to be sent back to the rental company.

[@cjwrench07]

@@sylviam6535 it saved the company transport costs, and improved profits, that’s it. By making it near instant E-waste, the cost is shifted onto the consumer & civil infrastructure for disposal.

[@alexclement7221]

Ah, Zip disks! Brings me back to my university days. When I started, the university system would allow you to save memory-heavy files (like CAD backups) directly to your storage anywhere on campus. But that became a liability with music file sharing, and they put a stop to it. So, instead, they installed Zip 100 ports on EVERY computer on campus. I bought 4 or 5 of them, which, at $10 each, was a good chunk of money for a poor engineering student. Also, when working with really big files, you could reach your limit. They were also fragile. Next year, they replaced all the Zip 100 drives with Zip 250's, and I bought a few more disks. I still have most of them, as well as a peripheral drive I had to buy to use them at home, but once I graduated, I never used them again.

[@ShooterQ]

LMG should hire people to catalogue and archive stories like this for the future.

[@MrBeeboh]

I also had Zip Disks. I lost some much freaking data on those dam things..!

[@rashidisw]

Yeah, i still remember the first time i got that Zip disk, but for the first USB flash? I already forgotten what brand that thing was.

[@FireFalcon]

One piece of storage tech I never knew about until about 3 years ago were ZIF drives. These were basically small hard drives put in small form factor laptops over a ribbon cable. I still have a 70GB one from an old Sony VAIO that I now have connected to a ZIF to Sata converter hanging on my wall.

[@HFHavenger]

SyQuest Removable Hard Drive Cartridges. My grandfather had aSyQuest drive for doing backups for the small town he was the mayor of in the 90's. He let me have a couple extra drive cartridges to put games on. One had the original Warcraft, the other had a game called Stellar 7. Good times...

[@DaveTexas]

The Bernoulli drive was my favorite failed storage medium. Back when a Mac had a 20MB hard drive, a Bernoulli disk could hold another 20MB of data. At the time, it was the greatest thing ever. Never mind that the disks cost a fortune - you essentially got a second hard drive! I used to store a backup copy of my entire hard drive on a Bernoulli disk. I upgraded to Zip disks after a few years, of course, but I always loved those big ol’ Bernoulli disks.

[@K31TH3R]

0:16 lol I actually had one of those USB Hitachi Microdrives. At the time, the capacity vs. flash based drives was not bad at all, the I/O performance and price wasn't too bad either. Definitely a product of it's time though, it was absurdly impractical, but kind of a cool little device considering how small the mechanical components were. It also failed after about a year, which was kind of the trend for Hitachi drives at the time. (Hitachi Deathstar... I mean.... Deskstar anyone?)

[@bland9876]

I heard they would put smaller HDDs in things like the og ipod just imagine one drop and scratch

[@BigLifeWithLitlJay]

We don't say the name Deskstar around my office. Or Quantum Bigfoot.

[@HarpaxA]

@@bland9876 I had one inside Creative Nomad Muvo 2 (with 8GB of microdrive), as opposed to 512MB other MP3. it was quite good never fail me for more than two year, until I lost it twice due to it's size 😅

[@SmallSpoonBrigade]

@@bland9876 It wasn't really that big of a deal at that point, provided that you were reasonably careful. At the time flash technology just wasn't advanced enough to allow for much space.

[@rickkaylor8554]

Pretty accurate video. I was on the Zip Drive development team and worked for Iomega for 12 years. I knew the founder of the company, Tony Radman, pretty well. I was initially a field sales engineer and then managed the technical support group. The data we gathered in our CRM system with customer feedback was directly used in the product design to make setup idiot proof. You could only set it up one way and the manual was just a fold out cartoon. The technical support group came up with the idea to put a clear window on the drive. The Zip drive was so idiot proof we got rid of the toll free support number and despite increasing sales by 1,000% we never added any support staff. The executive team decided to outsource the support so I got laid off. I made out really well on the stock which I bought for $1.50 and then sold when it hit $49 a share. Many of my co-workers became millionaires. I didn't own enough stock to get that rich but I did well. The stock was over valued so it tanked a few months afterward and a class action lawsuit was filed against Iomega because people lost so much money speculating on the stock. Iomega won the lawsuit because they didn't do anything illegal or wrong. It was a cool place to work for many years.

[@maligant23]

I LOVED Zip disks, and had a ton of them. When I was in college I would frequently be in the 24-hour computer lab. There was a policy that you couldn't install any video games onto the lab computers. I was able to run Quake off of a Zip disk, and every time a lab consultant tried to write me up I had to break it to them that I was playing the game off of a Zip disk I think they were honestly too impressed to take the matter any further. How about Tape Drives or Laser Disks or CEDs?

[@TheLimeyDragon]

Tape drives are still used and still advancing. The highest capacity tape is currently 18 TB with the LTO-9 format. LTO-10 plans to have 36TB capacity and long term plans for LTO-12 plan to have 144TB capacity,

[@moritzbecker131]

@@TheLimeyDragon Yes. Very common usecase

[@TheLimeyDragon]

@@moritzbecker131 I assume you're being sarcastic. Which I will therefore point out that I never CLAIMED it was a usecase used by everyone. I t was a reply to someone suggesting other formats in regards to "failed storage tech", where tape is not because it's still widely used in business/enterprise and for any data hoarder out there.

[@blakeparry1983]

@@TheLimeyDragon yep i work for an MSP and we have 3-4 clients still using tape for very large data set backup

[@defconzero]

"ZIP disks were especially popular with the Power Macintosh line." _Shows a G3 without a ZIP drive_

[@thany3]

I think those old Apple machines had SuperDisk instead, which is a different format.

[@defconzero]

@@thany3 I have a G4 that came stock with a ZIP drive. Some of the later G4s were sold with a DVD burner that I think Apple called the superdrive or something.

[@knghtbrd]

@@thany3 Vintage Mac collector here … Nothing even resembling a traditional floppy drive on the G3 PowerMac. This was after Apple had the Courage to ditch the 1.44MB floppy drive. Imation did sell a USB SuperDisk device. Well, they sold an external IDE SuperDisk device with a proprietary connector and a USB to IDE adapter with the matching proprietary connector. But they didn't make an internal one for the Mac. Internal Zip drives were common in smoke black plastic (I buy them because I know they're the ATAPI3 versions of the drives) and were also made with custom bezels for the bondi blue G3 and for the multi-bay of Apple notebooks of the era. The advantage of an external SuperDisk is that it would read both SuperDisk and 1.44MB floppies. The disadvantage is that as fragile as people remember Zip to have been, SuperDisks were jank city. I mean yes, if you stick a physically damaged Zip disk into a Zip drive, it'll tear the heads right off the drive. Click of death. And any drive thus damaged will damage any disk inserted into it. Really would have been nice to have transparent Zip disks, wouldn't it? But noooo…

[@efisgpr]

Still Crapple...all useless.

[@thany3]

@@defconzero SuperDisk LS-120 is one model, iirc. It's a 120MB floppy disk drive that is compatible with 1.4MB floppies.

[@InsaneWayne355]

ZIP drives were FAR from a failure. They just became obsolete, as most tech does.

[@samalton5837]

My thoughts exactly.

[@kidsafe]

@Billy White Jr. Yep, Zip pretty much stomped on LS 120, EZ 135 and all other comers.

[@edwardallenthree]

truth. I sent million dollar print jobs to printers on zip when I worked ad a production artist. it was a critical part of our business for a few years.

[@sovo1212]

THIS. They weren't even short lived, almost 10 years in the market. Besides, they were pretty convenient, sort of a "missing link" between floppy disks and HDDs. Last but not least, it isn't true they were killed by (re)writable CDs. Optical media was far slower and less convenient for saving data. It's true, however, that the advent of cheap DVD-Rs and RWs had a bigger impact because of their huge capacity. But, ultimately, Zip drives became obsolete because of flash memory becoming increasingly bigger and cheaper.

[@garcjr]

I never had the chance of owning one but the school I went to did. I lost many floppy disks due to them simply not working, age, etc. I never heard anyone having problems with ZIP. It would have been nice to have considering I only had a 750mb HDD at the time.

[@deusexaethera]

Zip disks are obsolete, not a failure. They addressed a market need better than all the alternatives at the time. What you SHOULD'VE mentioned was the SyQuest Sparq drive, which competed with the Iomega Jaz 1GB drive -- but it had a design defect that functioned like a mechanical virus, causing a damaged Sparq drive to damage any cartridges inserted into it, AND caused damaged Sparq cartridges to damage other drives. SyQuest never recovered from that disaster. On a different note, I still have a 2.3GB Fujitsu GigaMO magneto-optical drive in my desktop PC. I use it to backup my financial documents.

[@draeconix2]

Iomega also had the Jazz drive which held 2 GB of data. I actually have one of its would be competitors from Castlewood called the Orb drive. Exact same premise. It has a SCSI to USB interface cable.

[@TubbyJ420]

i remember seeing a 2GB Jaz drive at one of my friends house, it was the first time i ever saw windows show GB instead of MB. it blew my mind at the time.

[@nysaea]

Jaz cartridges were what brought peace on the family computer. No longer could people complain I moved anything I shouldn't have once I had my own Jaz to boot from 😂 it was the future!

[@Humbird00]

I remember ZIP Disks staying relevant up until USB flash drives became common. In fact I often used an entire USB ZIP drive with a disk inside just like a USB thumb drive to quickly move large files between computers, so it tended to fill the same role. Eventually someone realized the whole "drive" part of it was redundant and just attached a USB plug directly to some storage. The only alternative back then would have been an expensive and fragile external spinning hard drive.

[@cpljimmyneutron]

The Hitachi Microdrive worked with all Compact Flash devices... it was just a physical drive built in the form factor of a CF card, and it worked, and had way more storage, but was slower. It was NOT proprietary... it worked with all devices it could plug into. Also... the Hitachi Microdrive was not the only, and not the first microdrive. IBM and Samsung also made competing models with IBM being the first in 1999 with a 170MB version... but when Hitachi released their 2GB and 4GB versions in 2003 they absolutely dominated in storage size.... however by 2008 flash media had surpassed microdrives in storage and so they became obsolete.

[@hayzukreesto]

Aaaactually.. IBM came out with the Microdrive and then sold their entire HDD business to Hitachi. Also, it worked with CF Type II (thicker) slots, not the thinner, more common CF Type I. But yeah, at a time when standard flash cards had 32MB, having 340MB or 1GB was insanely awesome!!

[@thekaper]

@@hayzukreesto Well aaaactually... The ZX Microdrive came out in 1983 - for the ZX spectrum. 85kb of storage! And not at all a fragile 5 meters of tape that'd die if you looked at it wrong. Just shows that a good name of worth using again.

[@TheInternetHelpdeskPlays]

You missed off that the SD card was an extension of the MMC, the multimedia card. And I miss the LS-120 disk, the drive worked with standard floppies, connected to a standard IDE cable and stored 100Mb. And I think the Click of Death was Jazz drives, the sequal to Zip drives, they held 1 GB!

[@dacoz]

I remember the LS120, if it wasn't for flash memory/cd burners I think it would have lasted longer

[@domnanzwandor]

Yeah I remember lusting after that since zip drive refused to get cheaper. Then USB flash drives came and all was forgotten.

[@jamesrobertson504]

I'm old, so I remember in the 90s having Compaq computers at work w/o mechanical hard drives that we attached external Zip disk units to for extra storage, because they held more than a standard floppy disk. Also remember the dreaded click of death, so SOP was to save our work on two disks, just in case. In the late 90s they finally built a small LAN and switched to Dells with small hard drives and a local server. But we still backed up our work on floppy or Zip disks and printed out really important work, because the server crashed regularly. It wasn't until the 2000s that my employer brought in Oracle and Cisco to build out a decent network with offsite backup and disk backup finally ended.

[@LandonEmma]

What was cool that the Wii U used regular USB drives but it formats it to a format that we still don’t know, but get this, the format was only openable on the console and not on anything else, it was weird, but there was a reason, you could copy your games saved on their to your computer and upload the online if the USB wasn’t formatted. The reason they used USB was because it was easy to get, and the SD card was for photos and games on past consoles and devices, so instead of formatting your SD card you have from years ago you can just buy a USB for your Wii U and when you don’t want it you can just format it on a computer and open it!

[@Dagwagon-o7]

I had a SyQuest, similar to Zip but was an actually hard disk platter, and was 135MB. So BIGGER!! Loved that thing at the time.

[@Margalus]

Still have my SyQuest drive and all of my cartridges. Haven't fired that computer up though in over a decade, it's been stored in a closet.

[@Generalkidd]

Would definitely be interested in learning more about the HD-DVD format as well as LaserDisc

[@Jared_Garske]

Feels wierd seeing you on non Halo content.

[@JackMcSomeone]

I actually saw a couple of HD-DVDs at a thrift store today

[@humiliatedbreeze9605]

Mee Too.

[@risannd]

LaserDisc was surprisingly popular in Asia back in the day. It's usually used for music videos.

[@tytusromek9267]

watch Technology Connections, great channel

[@peterbreis5407]

I remember pointing out to the Zip salesmen, at one of the many computer shows I used to go to, how churning awful totally incompatible unreliable physical formats was a really bad idea and would rapidly lead to their demise, and he dismissively telling me, the customer, just how WRONG I was.

[@user540000]

Their proprietary incompatible format was far far more successful than the LS-120 backward compatible drives they tried to make industry standard. So I guess he showed you

[@video99couk]

In Europe we had a video format at the same time as Cartrivision, released in 1972. It did much better, not least because the quality was actually good and the machines worked well. It was called VCR, but is more commonly known as N1500 after the first machine model. It was updated with VCR-LP (or N1700) around 1976, which took the same tapes and there was even a third variant called Super Video Cassette, which took more or less the same tapes. The VCR format was not marketed in USA (beyond a trial run) due to technical constraints. I have working machines of all three variants.

[@FirstLast-vr7es]

I completely lost faith in Zip Disks as a teenager in the late '90s when the one I kept my entire dialup porno collection on developed the click of death. I never trusted one again after that.

[@polydynamix7521]

Zip Disks didn't fail everywhere. I've still got probably 40 of them containing tons and tons of backups from a long time ago. It was so much more viable than the expensive and easy to damage CD-r's and much better than tape.

[@SDRIFTERAbdlmounaim]

100 or 700mb ones ?

[@polydynamix7521]

@@SDRIFTERAbdlmounaim Technically it's not actually a zip disk, it's iomega's even rarer used Jaz disk. 1 gig, External USB 1 drive. I did previously have the 100 or 120 MB version of the zip disk but I don't actually have any of those left. In roughly 1996 or so I specifically remember spending many long hours copying 8 zips to 1 jaz. I drank a lot of coffee and watched a lot tv during that process.

[@SDRIFTERAbdlmounaim]

@@polydynamix7521that sounds like it was a lot of fun, how old are you if you don't mind me asking ?

[@polydynamix7521]

@@SDRIFTERAbdlmounaim 13 or 14, I had a job working like... a graphic artists apprentice? Not sure if that's the right term but if it's not I don't know another more apt.

[@chilledgaming1879]

thanks for the video. As an idea maybe, do you still know the ISA slot and network cards with token ring? How about a scenario, for example, to make a few retro computers with games from the time via Token Ring and recreate a network party as it was back then?

[@bgezal]

I remember first playing Doom co-op with my brother on a null-modem cable, with upgraded UARTs to run 115200 bps. Then I made a null-parallel cable, much less lag. Then by chance I got a couple of leftover 10BASE2 cards from work, and made a three computer LAN setup, and Doom worked great. Coax cables and terminators and all. Even at that time token ring was obsolete.

[@grenskul]

are they supposed to include the part where someone disconnects their cable with their chair and everyone loses network connectivity ?

[@adiond1]

That has piqued my interest, I would watch that.

[@zdanee]

I have an IBM PS/2 with an MCA TokenRing card in it, and OS/2. It does not run Doom though, way too slow. Wolf3D is the best it can muster.

[@highpath4776]

I think RMC The Cave is doing this in England

[@Critters]

This is a rare bad take. I would not say a product is a failure just because it eventually became obsolete or fell out of production. Zip was exactly what was needed at the time and crushed all other options for the price. By this logic floppy disks and even CDs are a failure because they have been surpassed.

[@amicloud_yt]

not a bad take at all

[@HyperSnypr]

The NES and it's cartridge based system was a flop of epic proportions, haven't seen anyone mainstream making them since the early 90s.

[@SilverDragonsmx]

​@@HyperSnypr The loader system from the original NA NES was a mistake from the start, but the cartridge itself wasn't an issue. Cartidges aren't inherently a bad idea, they were eventually just replaced with CDs and DVDs that could store much more information per-dollar, and could scale up more (more places could make CDs and DVDs, so you did not have to worry about supply issues), at the cost of generally needing much more space, which for a regular console, is not a problem. Certain handheld consoles (like the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation Vita, Nintendo's entire DS lineup, etc) use and still use cartidges (sometimes called "carts" or "cards") and digital distribution for games, because both are relatively compact. Digital Distribution is just installing a game to the internal flash, or sometimes an external microSD hard, and the cartidges don't need a bulky reader anywhere. The only handheld of note that uses disks of some kind is the PlayStation Portable, which is only technically, as you would insert a cart that carried the disk into the PSP, thereby technically making that a console that used carts that just had an optical disk inside. With the cost of flash storage being relatively inexpensive, and being fairly storage-dense, it would not surprise me if whatever the next major handheld is, shipped with up to 512GB of flash storage.

[@HyperSnypr]

@@SilverDragonsmx Um, I was joking

[@OzSteve9801]

My first digital camera had 3.5" floppies. This was before SD cards. You could only take about 12 photos and you had to get another floppy.

[@Crlarl]

These aren't all failed, they're just defunct. Zip and Memory Stick were successful.

[@VirusVox]

As someone who collects old tech, I must say ZIP Disks are INCREDIBLY useful. I have an external parallel ZIP drive and a couple internal drives and they're fantastic for performing full back ups of old systems. My first older PC, a 386 with an 85MB HDD, would fit an entire back up on one ZIP disk :D

[@OverkillTBP]

I was going to say, Zip Drive's ruled back in the day. I even ran a 386dx computer Win3.1 on a zip disk as the boot drive in case something went wrong with the small old hard drive. And man them old 3.5in floppy games were pretty cool back in the day :P I still have the zip drive and disks floating around somewhere, I bet its actually still useable, except, I'd have to buy a parallel port expansion thingy or adapter to get it to work, might even recover some old ass "cat photos" as well :P

[@joebedard9092]

I still have a USB zip drive. I also got an Iomega Bernoulli drive before zip; talk about chonky disk.

[@CAD_GEEK]

I used the Zip disk format for storing and backing up CAD data back in the day. The alternative was tape drives which were way too slow.

[@davidgarcia2016]

How does it feel to be in the industry long enough to watch the electronic era boom?

[@TD-er]

I had the parallel drive in my bag along with me to university. This way I could take along everything I downloaded during the day :) With the entire computer dept. connected via 44Mbps to the internet, you could download at near infinite speeds in those days. Now your mobile feels a bit slow if the speedtest shows less than that in the middle of nowhere, but in those days you had to share that bandwidth with the entire computer science department. (1996)

[@Intelwinsbigly]

@@TD-er Try living on adsl with a download speed under five mbps.

[@jdraven0890]

Same, ZIP was a godsend back then. I bought one of the first viable flash drives when it came out, too.

[@christopherleubner6633]

Yup i used them for that. Remeber those days Autocad 14 🤓

[@HelloKittyFanMan]

"...Than the proprietary Zip equipment that _only_ one company made." *FALSE,* Linus! *Fujifilm, Maxell,* and probably others made Zip disks too! And trying to claim it as a "failed" format just because it declined in 99 is like trying to claim optical discs as "failed" formats just because they've been declining now. Oops!

[@barongerhardt]

Totally agree. The first two weren't failed storage techs, just obsolete. Both enjoyed significant market share for many years. I would also argue that zip didn't get replaced by CD. Though CDs and their burners were getting cheaper and more common; the main use case of zip was replaced by the USB flash drive. Something similar to zip that I would call a failed tech were the higher capacity floppies (2.88, 4mb, ..) up to the superdisk 120/240 mb floppy. A couple other mostly 90s techs that failed to make widespread use but were common in the graphics industry were the Jaz and SyQuest drives.

[@HelloKittyFanMan]

@@barongerhardt: Zip disks ARE floppies. The 2.88, etc. you listed are just *standard-shaped* ones. I liked LS-240 for a little while but they became obsolete so fast that I hardly had much opportunity to use them to their full extent (including transfer to other machines). Yeah, technically you can format a CD to work in an easy-write sort of way like floppies (including Zip) and flash -- which is UDF on an RW disc -- but for whatever reason it seems that people mostly use opticals in write-once formats or disc-at-once even in RW mode, because disc-at-once is more efficient than file-by-file. So I can see why you'd say Zip floppies got replaced more by flash than by CDs, DVDs, or Blu-ray discs. Jaz and SyQuest are hard disks. Iomega replaced their Jaz with the Peerless and then Rev, and I even have Jaz and Rev too, but even Rev got obsolete too fast for me to really take advantage of it. Oh well, flash is pretty cool, but I was always fascinated by the idea of coming full-circle from the OLD days of the very first removable hard disks (those huge ones that came on some sort of tray with a handle in the middle, that I've only seen in videos).

[@awkdk1]

I think by equipment they meant the actual hardware... Though I agree it didn't fail, it was just superseded.

[@currentsitguy]

@@awkdk1 It wasn't even the hardware. I had a Zip Drive made by a company called, if I recall, EZonics. I was a Zip Drive for laptops that worked off of a PCMCIA card interface.

[@stopthink9000]

I absolutely LOVED my ZIP drive. I loved the design, the feel, the "chunk!" sound when the disk went into the reader. That was some quality tech back then. Glad I got to experience it.

[@RayMak]

I still have my Iomega zip drives

[@TheAlaskaAdam]

Zip Disks didn't fail any more than VHS failed they just became obsolete. They were really popular in the 90's.

[@HyperSnypr]

@@TheAlaskaAdam I was there too, they did have a decent fail rate. Never had anything important fail on me personally, but can attest to college friends losing stuff. Edit - I'm pretty sure there was a believable college scam around this, where people would hand in a known failed disk to get an extra few days on a C.A.

[@TheAlaskaAdam]

@Defective Degenerate I used Zip drives throughout the 90's. If you watched the video you saw they were shipping in Apple and Windows machines at the time so there was plenty of faith in them from companies whos reputations at least in part relied on, well, reliability. Clearly there are bound to be failures in magnetic tape media, it doesn't take much of a magnetic field to affect them. 50% is certainly an outlier though and I'm guessing your statement is mostly hyperbolic. I also highly doubt your last statement.

[@santosmurilo]

The PS Vita proprietary memory was totally nonsense! Also I hated so much the Memory Stick prices back when I had a PSP and wanted to go (almost) fully digital

[@Cr0frog]

I went with an adapter for 2 micro SDs for my PSPs back in the day, having 32gb was bloody LIT

[@shadowtheimpure]

@@Cr0frog Fast-forward to today where my Vita has a 512GB micro-sd card tucked into an SD2Vita.

[@YdenMk-II]

@@Cr0frog Mirco SD adapters took a while to come out but yes they were the way to go when they finally did. Main issue with those would have been how to get around the whole proprietary thing Memory Sticks had going for it. Any 3rd party memory stick things would have to get a license fee to be released from Sony and one of the main reason why Vita memory cards remained so high price wise is because either Sony wouldn't license out manufacturing of them or no one wanted to pay to make 3rd party cards.

[@Ebalosus]

Same with regards to the PSP. The 2Gb card I got for mine cost nearly a third of what the PSP itself cost, which even in 2007 I found obnoxious.

[@yamigekusu]

I bought a 16gb Vita memory card for like $34...USED. Man, Sony's proprietary memory cards are way overpriced :( And I remember my 1gb PSP memory stick being like $45 or so... back in 2007. Yep

[@a.j.haverkamp4023]

ZIP also came in a SCSI version. I owned 3 different ones, external parallel, internal IDE and internal SCSI. At work we also had the much more expensive and bigger Jaz drive which was a 1000 MB vs the ZIP drive that was 100 MB at that time. I never knew that ZIP drives evolved into bigger versions. I think I started using rewritable CDs to transport data at that time. And I do have some Sony memory sticks, for my Sony Ericson K750 mobile phone. In one of my my drawers I have a small bag with all kinds of memory cards, smart media, Fuji xD, etc

[@vipermageex5861]

I used work at a computer training/repair company, and I remember Zip Disks for their horrendous failure rate and always steered customers away from them.

[@PaulTheFox1988]

I adored my K750i, that used m2 cards though didn't it? Either way, what an awesome phone that was. I hated Sony's naming of Memory Stick, there was the original, the pro, the duo, the pro duo, and then m2, not to be confused with m.2 A total fustercluck of a naming scheme and finding adapters for each variant was a pain.

[@TD-er]

The ones mainly sold as "IDE" versions of the ZIP drive were actually ATAPI devices. Those hit the market around 1997. Before that you only had the SCSI versions (internal and external) and LPT ones for on the printer port. However the first "IDE" versions of the ZIP drive were actually IDE drives. This had as a positive effect that you could boot from those drives on really old PCs that didn't support ATAPI (mainly used for CD-roms) and also didn't need any driver to run it in DOS. The major drawback was that typically IDE was not considered hot-swappable, so caching algorithms were not written to deal with a drive being ejected for example. Also you could not switch between the 25 (or was it 40??) MByte ZIP discs which were sold in the early days as the "low density" ZIP discs, analog to how diskettes with different capacities were labelled. Those were just less expensive, but I don't know if they actually had lower density or maybe from the factory marked some areas as faulty. Of course the "Click of Death" was the final nail on the coffin of ZIP discs and it was comparable to a hardware virus. Once you had a disc that shows this clicking sound, you should never ever use that disc again on any drive or you would destroy that drive too. Any disc inserted in a drive which once was "infected" by this CoD would also get damaged and thus spread the CoD "virus". It actually damaged your drive and discs. There were lots of other drive formats too which were less popular, like the Jazz drive. This was very similar to the ZIP drive, only could hold 1GB of data. Not 100% sure, but I think it could also read ZIP 100 discs. There was also the 44MB Bernoilli drive, which was roughly the size of a 5.25" floppy, only about the thickness of a CD case. These were quite fast, similar to the internal ZIP drives, but made an unsound amount of noise. And don't forget the QIC-80 tapes and later the Travan tape drives which could also handle those 250 MB (with 2:1 compression, thus 125 netto) QIC-80 tapes. Those were insanely popular here among those "data enthusiasts" before broadband internet was available and Crazy Bytes CDs were becomming a hit. Later you had those DAT DDS tapes, which could hold 4 GB (2:1 compression thus 2GB netto) and a friend of mine even had a tape changer at home to hold upto 6 of these tapes in a single cartridge.

[@kamui004]

In the mid-90s zip were the better alternative to CDs till mass market made the later dirt cheap, I remember my first 1x CD writer had come down under $1000 but it still cost as much as my computer and the blank CD-Rs as much as $10-20 each or something like that. The Jaz also had 2TB disks. While I used zip for school, at work they had stacks of Jaz to move data from the graphics design department in our offices to the printing press on the other side of the city back when sending big files over dial-up internet was not an option. And if the zip's click of death was painful, Jaz had it too.

[@a.j.haverkamp4023]

@@TD-er I owned a QIC-80 tape drive too. You had to buy a multi IO card that supported 2.88 MB floppy drives, because they did 1 Mbps. Double the speed of the normal 1.44 MB floppies. The tape drive was connected to the floppy drive cable. Boy, oh boy. The money I spent in the 90’s when computer innovation was quick and the development of Windows and software like WP & Word required faster and faster PCs. 3Com 509 ISA NIC, 905 PCI NIC, coax to utp. 3DFX add-on card to daisy chain with your VGA card. Modems, sound card (I had a red PCB Gravis Ultrasound). My first PC was a XT 8088 which I quickly replaced with a very expensive 486DX33, later upgraded to DX2 66 and DX4 100. Serial mice. Flatbad scanner with a proprietary controller. Life with USB made so many things much simpler. I had to Google the Jaz drive, in my memory too it was spelled with 2 z’s. But Jaz should be the correct spelling.

[@Wesstuntube]

Those microdrives were absolutely incredible. The idea to make an actual, spinning platter hard drive that fits in the form factor of a compact flash card was absolutely insane. Even more insane is that they actually pulled it off, and even made them in 8 GB sizes towards the end. Even today, I look at those things and I don't know how they did it. That they were able to actually manufacture the micromachinery necessary to make those work at a price that could be sold on the consumer market . . . geez. Cramming more floating gate transistors onto a die won the day eventually in pretty much every metric, but in many ways the older tech is more impressive.

[@verumignis4778]

single use dvds. i wasnt around for them but am very glad they arent a thing today

[@daniel-pablo]

It makes me sad that we live in a time where it needs to be explained that phones used to have expandable storage

[@Scooty_]

Just buy an android, my modern Samsung phone still has expandable storage

[@daniel-pablo]

@@Scooty_ bruh samsung hasn't had micro SD for 2 generations.

[@Scooty_]

@@daniel-pablo oh shit its 2022, my bad i forgot the current generation i have a s9

[@daniel-pablo]

@@Scooty_ yup things took a hard turn. I miss the Samsung S and note 9 series. Last phones they made that were truly no compromises.

[@c.p.browne6871]

I remember Zip Disk's short lived competitor, SparQ. They had the'advantage of being a whole ONE GIG size disk, but unfortunately their external drives were tragically unreliable.

[@KevinFields777]

This is what Linus should have talked about.

[@katbryce]

Iomega had Jazz drives which were also 1GB, later 2GB. A lot more expensive than Zip, but useful for people who needed that amount of storage on a single disk.

[@BrownFoxWarrior]

I remember seeing Zip drives around, but I was always told they were just for floppy disks. Which I suppose isn't too far from the truth, but now I see that wasn't exactly correct, either.

[@lundsweden]

They made sense in the 90s when the choice was a 1.44mb floppy or a very expensive CD burner or MO drive (magneto optical). Flash storage and cheap harddrives had'nt quite arrived. But I don't look back on Zips fondly, they were horrible! Still, I used 'em with my Akai S2000 from '96 until the early 2000s (via SCSI).

[@reigndespair7053]

Tape is a very interesting data storage technology. I was amazed that when I was in school over a decade ago used tape to backup/store data. It may shock some people that tape is still used to this day! Really interesting considering the very 1st generation computers made in WW2 to decrypt the enigma machine ran on tape! Super interesting stuff!

[@hmoham]

I remember in University, I used to dream of one day being able to afford a Zip drive, and store all my homework on one disk and not have to carry a case of Floppy disks to Uni everyday. That never happened and I never got to use a Zip drive.

[@masternobody1896]

lol who use cd this days. i only use cloud and dna storage. xD. no more floppy disks

[@masternobody1896]

in the future black hole storage can store unlimited data.

[@drewcipher896]

@@masternobody1896 Retrieving data stored in black holes is still a bit tricky. 😆

[@phrebh]

I did get a zip drive, right at the end. I only had two zip disks and I don't know that I used either one. I can dust it off and ship it out to you for a very reasonable price. 😂

[@andrewmtgx]

@@phrebh what's a reasonable price?? 😂 i got one of these memory long boi sticks too

[@Shmey]

One of my friends had a Zip Drive in approximately the mid-90's. It's true, it was somewhat expensive to get the drive. Still, 100MB in a portable format was absolutely phenomenal. Thankfully, CDs were right around the corner.

[@katbryce]

CDs were useless for random writes though, so they could only be used for backups, not as a working drive.

[@Shmey]

@@katbryce That's true. Of course, if you could afford a CD burner, chances were you could basically buy as many CDs as you needed. They did eventually come up with rewritable discs, but I never needed that feature. I'm not going to say that zip drives were not cool technology for their time. I really wanted one, but couldn't justify the expense.

[@Shmey]

@@dggcreations Yeah, now that you mention it, it wasn't just, "Oh, I want Zip drives, but now CDs are a thing, so I'll do that, instead." In my case, there was a little bit of finishing high school (my friend was a year ahead of me), a bit of going to the Marines, A school, and C school in the Marines. After that, there was about 3 months in the fleet before I was PCS to Japan. Finally, when I came back, it was in the early 2000's. (Before Sep. 11) Burnable CD's had probably matured enough by then that I didn't have as many issues with them.

[@TheXero]

For the time the Zip disk served me well. I had my first SNES emulator on it with some games for my old Mac.

[@adamclark9552]

im pretty sure I used mine for ZSNES emulation as well. lmao

[@richkurtz6053]

As an onsite PC/LAN professional, the 100MB Parallel ZIP drive was a godsend building new PC's, installing Windows 95/98 and applications without having to flip a mass of floppy disks. Years before the Zip drives, my home server had a 10MB hard drive running Netware with 2 10MB Iomega Bernouli drives. This was a bigger server than our company had in the office. Transient technologies usually serve their purpose for a while before being replaced with bigger, faster, better. I wonder what will replace USB drives?

[@KamenRiderSeiryuXV0]

Zip Disc: Failed storage. Floppy Disk: Are you kidding me!?

[@sirsholar]

Cartrivision discontinued after 13 months 😱 I hope they had a return policy for the sorry folks who bought the combination TV.

[@Emptiness_Machine_2001]

errr no, not to my knwoledge. That's just sth companies don't do

[@Ali-Sensei]

Yeah it was 12 month return policy hhh

[@Emptiness_Machine_2001]

@@Ali-Sensei oh really? Didn't hear about that yet

[@TheJunnutin]

@@Emptiness_Machine_2001 I believe ALI sensei was making a funny =)

[@Emptiness_Machine_2001]

@@TheJunnutin oh that sounds more logical, sorry. A bit tired and not really fit rn, sorry.

[@MTGeomancer]

I use a micro SD to Memory Stick adapter in my PSP, never bought an actual "Memory Stick". And Zip drives were for small fry, Jaz drive FTW. It was 1 GB! A whole gigabyte!! It was basically a removable hard drive.

[@TechSpec814]

I had a memory stick for my PSP, but once I learned about micro SD to MS, I never went back.

[@TheBritishPatriot]

If you’re a 90’s kid you remember most, if not all of these!

[@savagepro9060]

if you're a 80s kid?

[@andreww2098]

@@savagepro9060 you were too busy typing in basic or 'Machine Code' from a magazine to worry about new fangled storage media, a 90 minute cassete and an old tapedeck were all you had!

[@savagepro9060]

@@andreww2098 but we went through the 90s too

[@outsideredge]

I spent a year at university in the late 90s (TechBC, before it became SFU Surrey) that was all about tech, and they really hyped those Zip disks and zip drives. They had those PowerMacs you mentioned and encouraged everyone to get a zip drive and disc to be able to transfer large files between work and school. That was a somewhat pricey ask (I think the disks alone were about $25), but we went with it. The following year, the school gave everyone FTP folders to transfer files over the internet, making the Zip drives and disks unnecessary. I still have and use an Iomega branded external hard drive.

[@PWNHUB]

lmao 0:42 Sony cameras are still particularly popular.

[@ragon2727]

I dunno if Zip drives really count as "failed" anymore than floppy. Same could be said for Tape Drives too. All great for when and what they did. But completely left in the dust by modern tech.

[@2001herne]

Well, tape drives are still in use, just not for "active" use, they're very much an archival media.

[@bgezal]

Tape drives are still the only option to backup large data, and they develop in capacity and speed every year.

[@underflip2]

i was a big fan of the zip drive back in the day but I always lusted over the orb drive. it was kinda like zip but could hold gigabyes instead of megabytes which was completely insane at the time.

[@JoFreddieRevDr]

The is a huge difference between obsolescence and failure, the ZIP drive was successful for long enough before becoming obsolete, that I question if calling it a failure is valid. of the 3 examples I'd only consider Cartrivision to be an actual failure. (Linus wouldn't be post stuff he knows he is going to get called out on to generate comments, to play the KZbin algorithms by any chance would he?)

[@joshjones5172]

I guess if your definition of success is having a technology like CD's and 3½-inch floppy disks that were invented a decade before your product, still being sold a decade after your product is no longer used...

[@e-cap1239]

@@joshjones5172 floppy drives still existed because they were extremely cheap, but few people used them in the 2000s instead of flash. CDs obviously have the advantage of a higher storage capacity but one detail is that re-writable CDs didn't exist when the zip drive came out. They are also considerably slower, and the reason for their popularity was how popular music CD players were.

[@MonochromeWench]

Microdrives as pictured at the beginning of the video was a tiny hard drive designed to be used in CF card devices. It made sense cause microdrives could be much higher capacity than cf cards at the time and the cf interface is just ide so hard drive industry already knew it. The limitation was microdrives drew higher current than cf cards so they weren't compatible with all devices.

[@travs_no_mechanic2866]

The graph at 1:15 adds to 102%

[@basantatamang2249]

😂😂😂

[@eldibs]

"Phones with expandable SD storage used to be more common." Thanks, Apple, for spreading your anti-consumer garbage!

[@TheSjuris]

Google doesn’t use SD cards either. Might have something to do with Microsoft getting free money from using a proprietary file system.

[@ihavenoideas5844]

@@TheSjuris exFAT isn't proprietary anymore

[@TheSjuris]

@@ihavenoideas5844 it was for years and it’s also insecure. Neither Apple nor Google wanted to use a service to help a competitor out at all and is lacking security. But, hey if you want easy access to your device by any law enforcement agency that’s up to you. Apple doesn’t like that at all. Google gladly will share your data with anyone willing to pay.

[@eldibs]

@@TheSjuris Back in the day if you bought an Android phone, you could reliably expect it to have an SD card slot unless it was a *really* cheap phone. But other companies started following Apple's nonsense and stopped putting them on the expensive phones, so now you don't get one unless you specifically look for it.

[@TheSjuris]

@@eldibs back in the day, Microsoft charged every single company a fee to use their formatting system to do that. Apple and Google refused to pay the Microsoft tax for that reason and that it’s unsecured. Funny thing is that not using it only affected Android phones. The ones that were either were willing to pay the fee or the ones that Microsoft sued to get them to pay the fee.

[@supernova874]

I used Iomega Zip 100 until late 2000 where i made the full transition to CD ... was great for backup and i hadn't not even 1 disk failed but speed was NOT fast in comparison to a CD so ...

[@HyperSnypr]

Says a lot about the speed of zips though, as CD was painfully slow too.

[@supernova874]

@@HyperSnypr yeah but zip has seek speed even slower it was great for backup but for everyday usage painful but reliable none than less.

[@HyperSnypr]

@@supernova874 Oh yeah, don't get me wrong. I remember it being slow, but for CD to be faster really reminds me how slow it could be at times.

[@andrewmtgx]

@@HyperSnypr Honestly where did sdcards in phones go

[@Mr.Morden]

Jaz drives over SCSI were way better than zip and CDs of that era. CDs burners were more of a thing much later on when a burner drive was a couple hundred dollars.

[@Sizukun1]

I love these trips down tech failures and memory lane of "OH MAN I had one of those and it was awful!"

[@milgeekmedia]

Gosh! Zip disks! They were a blessing when we got into our second year of Art College! We struggled in our first year with file management - particularly because huge 'Designer Republic' inspired graphics were the in thing, but ZIP disks were our salvation! It was all very short lived though - by the time I completed my Degree they were obsolete! :(

[@beezle1976]

I understand that you're not asking specifically about audio/video media, but I find things like movies on vinyl and the original hd/1080p format fascinating (an ehanced VHS format on cassettes very, very much like a standard vhs cassette) and there's not a lot of content covering them online. Would love to see an LTT spin on them.

[@ScottGrammer]

"Locking people into our own ecosystem is a bad idea." --Said no one who ever worked for Apple.

[@CapnSlipp]

I think you mean Tim Cook. Steve Jobs’ Apple released the first PC with USB ports, invented Firewire and opened it as standard IEEE 1394, switched their computers to using standard user-replaceable IDE drives, and switched to industry-standard Intel CPUs and provided tools to dual-boot into Windows or Linux.

[@skurblord3401]

*And lived to see the light of day.

[@thany3]

@@CapnSlipp It wasn't invented by Apple. Apple did help and initiate to develop it, but I wouldn't call that an invention.

[@jongrey1916]

I'm not defending Apple's blatant anti-consumer policies however I've heard that the original decision to lock components to specific devices was made for a valid reason to hinder black-market counterfeiters who at the time were harvesting components from old/broken phones and slapping them in low quality knock-offs and selling them on (at the time) poorly regulated online marketplaces and was hurting Apples image and profit margins as people thinking the cheap junk was real obviously were blaming Apple. That is according to someone that claims to have been involved in that original decision though I've never been able to confirm that claim I do know they did work for Apple around that time and while I have no reason to trust or distrust them as I've spent maybe an hour of my life talking to them casually and that's not enough to accurately judge character it certainly makes sense and is a 100% plausible scenario so I am inclined to give the claim some weight. Clearly things have gotten out of hand since then since they do things that there's no legit reason to do for anti-counterfeiting purposes but it's entirely possible it all started from a legit business concern that opened the door to abuse - as is often the case. Obviously I'm not causing shit for someone else so I'm keeping my source's name out of my motherfucking mouth so my "guy I know" argument can be slapped down if you're so inclined. It could be "fake news" - the real fake news not the fake fake news that the real fake news folks claim the fake fake news folks are... clearly.

[@skurblord3401]

@@jongrey1916 The problem with that is they block legitimate sales of components and then block actual scavenged components that are being used to repair apple products from functioning. Its shows its a strawman argument used to force people to buy new goods even if their device is still functional/easily repairable or even already repaired. We shouldn't defend a company who goes out of the way to screw its customers.

[@daydream605]

1:20.. Uh your editor kinda f'd up.

[@DefensiveLettuce]

I feel like you could have expanded the Memory Stick to a whole sublist of Sony’s attempts to make proprietary storage formats. The MiniDisc, VMUs, the proprietary storage format for the Vita when they could have just gone with SD. The list is probably way longer these are the first that come to mind.

[@AaronOfMpls]

MiniDisc did catch on as a replacement for cassettes in Europe and Japan -- especially for making mixes in the late 90s-mid 00s. Just not in North America though.

[@DefensiveLettuce]

@@AaronOfMpls I loved minidisc personally. It was so convenient. I still have my player and discs around somewhere. I had no idea it took off in other places. It definitely didn’t in NA, you’re right.

[@AaronOfMpls]

@@DefensiveLettuce Being American, I mostly learned about it through UK KZbinrs like Techmoan. Though if you want someone North American, This Does Not Compute did a nice overarching episode on it too. kzbin.info -- search his channel for MiniDisc for the several videos he's done about the format, various players, and modern retro-style releases on it. And here's This Does Not Compute's video on it: kzbin.info/www/bejne/eXSuaWyMabOjgLs

[@DefensiveLettuce]

@@AaronOfMpls thanks, I’ll check them both out. Take a trip down memory lane. Yeah it was awesome in high school playing sports and not having to worry about the skipping of a CD player, plus it was rewritable, more durable than CDs, and could carry more songs. So underrated here (in Toronto) I’m not sure how well it was adopted outside of the Toronto area.

[@bgezal]

I had/have minidisc walkman imported from Japan, and a deck with recording, and discs. It was a bit of work recording and labelling the tracks but it was so much better than the skipping cd-walkmans. It would've been a much larger thing if not the mp3 players killed it.

[@samsoulee]

Sony has an impressive track record of expensive useless proprietary memory format.

[@wmcapriceforum]

I remember they had a Jaz drive, which was more of a removable HDD with 1GB capacity or something. Also the SuperDisk LS120 was an attempt at an updated floppy which was backwards compatible with 3.5" drives. In short, life before USB flash drives sucked.

[@elbiggus]

Minor pedantic note: Zip drives also came in SCSI flavours.

[@TheLionAndTheLamb777]

This makes me think of the Iomega Jazz drives that are much rarer.

[@SkullAngel002]

When I worked at Best Buy back in the late 90's, I remember countless customers became hopelessly confused when asking about storage options. We had 2.88MB floppies, 100MB Zip Drive/Disks, 120MB LS-120 Superdrive/Disks, Sony MiniDisc, Tape Drives, and CD-R/CD-RW (both internal & external) that made us passing employees actively avoid the PC-HO department, even if it meant a longer walk back to our respective departments.

[@johnmijo]

I think I still have one of those Superdisk Drives stored away someplace. Did you ever get one of those combination 5.25 inch + 3.5 inch AIO Diskette Drives ? I have one I keep in my old DOS machine for testing, last time I tested the unit it could still read/write and format diskettes.

[@SkullAngel002]

@@johnmijo We didn't have those combo drives at Best Buy or the computers I grew up with (386 = 5.25, 486 = 3.5) using for school. However, it was a pain managing both disk sizes at home when it came to school papers and projects.

[@johnmijo]

@@SkullAngel002 yes it would be a pain, this is why I sourced one and special ordered it, basically it was like placing a slim-line 5.25 and 3.5 inch diskette drive into one 5.25 inch bay, it had the standard edge connector for the 5.25 inch drive and the IDC 40 pin floppy connector on the 3.5 inch drive.

[@YOEL_44]

I still got some Memory Sticks from my PSP, and a few M2 Memory Stick Micro from a couple SonyEricsson W610i, I loved those tiny phones!!

[@ESDI80]

I love Zip disks as being a retro computer collector they make it very easy to back up and transfer data on older machines.

[@jonathansturm4163]

Immediately prior to the Zip drive there was a proprietary format called Floptical. It combined magnetic and optical technologies to store data on media similar to standard 3.5 inch floppy disks. The discs held 21 MB but they were slow and not particularly reliable. When I heard about Zip I immediately ordered the original external SCSI version. It was a godsend!

[@lurkerrekrul]

I had a Zip drive for my Amiga. I also had TWO of the power supplies die on me. The first, I literally just unplugged it so that I could feed the cord behind something and when I plugged it back in, it was dead. I forget what happened to the second. As I recall, Iomega replaced both at no charge. My drive started making a clicking sound, but as far as I can tell, it never damaged any disks. It sounded like the metal shutter being repeatedly opened.

[@megavern72]

I remember owing an Iomega Jaz drive. It was similar to the Zip drive but it could hold one gigabyte of data because it was basically a hard drive platter in a cartridge. Unfortunately, the drives were pretty fragile and didn't last long because they suffered from head crashes similar to real hard drive. It was a good idea but it didn't work out.

[@LostCylon]

I worked at a small company, and the zip disks were wonders, simply back up your information at the end of the day, and if (when) you had a computer failure it was relatively easy to restore your data.

[@JakalairVG]

When I started college in the mid 1990s each computer in the lab had a zip drive on it. It was the media that most people used in the comp sci program since it could store an entire website from that time period.

[@shannonrhoads7099]

My Zip drive was a lifesaver. I had to move suddenly and did not have my own computer. I did have a Zip drive, and so I had been using it for my stuff on the roommate's computer. Given that the sudden moving out coincided with me losing my job, and the scramble to find work, I ended up taking months to put together a computer of my own one component at a time. While I saved for hard drives and stuff, I booted DOS 6 and included my Iomega parallel port drivers on a floppy. I could then launch Windows 3.1 and play some DOS games from the Zip Drive. This also let me print up copies of my resume and other stuff. It was a horrible kludge job, but it worked while I got back on my feet. As a happy coincidence, I enrolled at the local community college shortly afterward and they had installed Zip drives on all of the on-campus computers.

[@AndyDillbeck]

I worked in a university IT department in the early 2000 when Zip Disks were big, and all the new computers for the labs came with 1 zip disk each, which my boss let us take if we wanted to. I think I still have a tub with a bunch of them. They were pretty great for school stuff: as big or bigger than a lot of the USB memory sticks of the day. Also pretty dependable.

[@DaHaiZhu]

always fun watching linus flailing his arms around

[@fatalicus]

My first experience with ZIP drives was my friends Mr. Backup Z64, that he got for his Nintendo 64. It blew my mind how many games he could fit on one disk.

[@jpdemer5]

The Bernoulli Box was a high-capacity format that lasted all of five years on the market. Ditto the SparQ and Orb drives. All were killed off by Iomega's Zip, which was hardly a "failed" technology. (I had one for several years; it was the chief alternative to the floppy drive.) Zip lasted until CD-R optical drives eventually replaced it, after a pretty good run.

[@rolls_8798]

1:32 I find it incredibly sad that this message has to be shown new phones genuinely have way fewer features, and if you support the companies by buying those phones you're just perpetuating and worsening the cycle. consider buying an older or second-hand phone

[@hjr2000]

Zip drives were really useful back in the day when the usual storage was a 1.44MB disk. Zip discs were at least 100MB if I remember correctly. A real blessing at University.

[@cbremer83]

I worked at a Microcenter back in 2009-2013. We sold zip disks in our media section. Did not sell many of them, but we had them.

[@mjmeans7983]

Here's one... The AMDECK/AMDISK Amstrad Compact Floppy Disk Format (CF-2) which was a 3" hard case floppy disk format. It was compatible with the TRS-80, IBM-PC, Atari 400/800 and Apple II (and a few others). It was a competitor to the 3.5" microfloppy from 1982 to 1990. Several manufacturers, including Maxel, produced CF-2 disks. They stored 180 KB per side. The disk was flipped over to use the other side. -- I used one of these drives back in the day with a TRS-80 Color Computer when I was working translating games written for the Commodore 64.

[@SudoYETI]

Fun Fact. Iomega had a software engineering office in my tiny home town and during highschool they had an explorers after school program where they were supposed to teach about 6 of us how to program. What we actually did was play Quake III Arena with the engineers, eat pizza, and drink mountain dew until late into the evening. Good times.

[@ChristinaGXL]

They didn't fail, they had a lot of uses over the years. Just look up the DTU-100, a zip drive for aircraft still in use to update the FMS! Also in the 90s it was much more common for people to pick a backup system and stick with it, like with the Ditto drives and things like that. It was a huge advancement at the time. Right place, right time, just the world moved on to better things.

[@AB-wf8ek]

I don't understand how Zip disks were considered good in any capacity. I had the click of death wipe my data on 2 unrelated occasions, that was enough for me to swear them off forever. The fact that you're playing Russian roulette with your data anytime you do as little as read a disk seems like an absolute failure to me.