LGR Oddware - The Iomega ZIP Drive Experience

We had to replace an entire classroom of zip drives more than once, as well as every disk because click of death was contagious. Bad disks would damage the drive, giving it COD, then and disk used in that drive would become damaged and would give COD to other drives it was tried to be used in. Eventually the cause of mass drive failures was figured out and new model drives and disks that were immune got installed. I liked that class. Before that, a high school "computer class" was basically just a modern rehash of the old typewriter classes, so you only learned the basics and the focus was on using word as of we were going to have to transcribed stuff former. (I middle school we did have computer class as well, but that was mostly typing and was on ancient Apple IIe's, but our teacher did get in to programming on them sometimes, which was amazing at the time.) The high school class with the zip drives was something all together an experiment here in combination with an English and history class. Unlike normal class assignments, every student in this program had the same 3 teachers for these classes, just at different times, in 3 rotations. Instead of being about lessons and doing single tasks, it more focused on projects and was more like professional work than normal school has been prior (at one point we ab multi month long project of actually running a business at the school which would be in competition against the other half of students in the program and sold some foodstuffs to students). The computer class severed both as a sort of dedicated lab period for working on projects of the other 2 classes (which themselves had overlap with each other), but also had it's own projects focused on using various software packages at the time like early Photoshop and basic 3D cad. This was why we needed zip disks, floppies were just to small and server based storage at the time was out of the program's budget. I have that program to thank/blame for my first job, which was working in the IT department of the school district. Not only were they the ones that flew the job opening in class senior year (was TA for comp class then), but apparently because I had been in that program, I, and another dude from another school (shoutout to Aubert for introducing me to happy hardcore and generally being a cool guy), were instant hires over the other random 10-12 random kids that applied. Ingesting times.

Kadah

Holy smokes I lived though every minute of this. I was so into Zip drives I spent a road trip going from San Diego to Roy, Utah just to see the Iomega facilities. This was a time when a typical PC or notebook might still come with a 60 MB hard drive. One of the all-time great stocks for awhile, when Zip announced the stock was about $1.50 and when it had run its course, it was about $330 two years later (not accounting for the stock splits, which added up to 12-for-1) ... before things went downhill. A lot of people were hoping this would be the new standard floppy drive, but I guess they were about a year too late for that. The drive you opened in the video was a later manufacturing iteration -- the very first wave of drives were absolutely bristling with chips on the PCB. Within a few months they were already making good integration progress. A competitor I don't think you mentioned was the long-forgotten Syquest, which made removables with hard platters. Syquest was the first time I ever made money shorting a stock -- after Iomega's stock run-up, people were chatting about Syquest being the "next Iomega" ... and of course they were soon driven bankrupt by Iomega. Good financial tip -- if you missed investing in X, don't invest in the "next X" because that never works. I think as recently as 2008 I had an internal Zip I could boot to, and I'd use it to boot into old DOS.

Kevin Furr

Always had a soft spot for zip disks. We had the Parallel 250mb one and if you think writing to a 100mb disk is slow just try doing it on a 250mb drive. Also eventually got a USB 750mb drive a couple years ago at goodwill for $2. Have only used it a few times as it does make setting up a new 9X install easier when you can copy all the floppies to one drive.

that transition at 13:33 from cam to screencap. very smoooooooth

mavrick

The disks themselves really do feel great. Especially compared to the crappy build quality of the drives, haha

LGR

Whoa, I've never heard of that! That's wild

LGR

Wubba lubba dub dub

LGR

Heh, there was a limitation on when you could redeem your Iomega rebate. I think it was a couple years or something.

LGR

Yeah it's hard to believe these are so outdated now, and there's a generation growing up that have never used them

LGR

Whoa, that's new to me! Neat.

LGR

Thank you, I'm glad to hear it!

LGR

Thank you!

LGR

Sounds like you need an SGI O2

LGR

;) #NotSponsored

LGR

Y'know, I've never tried that.

LGR

Man, I used these things so much in college, what a flash back to the past. I loved how robust they felt in the hand so much more substantial than any floppy disk.

Insrteresting

floverSaeu09

Interesting video Clint! I recently wrote an article on the unreleased Dreamcast Zip Drive. Got some new info on it from a former director at Iomega. <a href="http://www.dreamcastlive.net/blogs/post/The-Dreamcast-Zip-Drive-Expanding-Online-Possibilities/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://www.dreamcastlive.net/blogs/post/The-Dreamcast-Zip-Drive-Expanding-Online-Possibilities/</a>

pcwzrd13

Can you plug a zip drive into another? Also, if yes, how many can you?

Zet The Legendary Hero

That was the case with the loading, yep! I reshot this episode last night so a fixed version will go up soon :)

LGR

I enjoyed your Cheerwine break while the Zip drive was receiving the Duke Nukem game... was like short TV ad, haha :D

Lindsay Michelle

I used to absolutely LOVE my Zip drive. Even when I bought my Yamaha 2x SCSI CDR (the one with the disk caddy), I still used the ZIP because overwriting. Ah the memories.

Ant Field

Rick and Morty reference appreciation acknowledgement.

Matthew Dooley

I've been shooting in 60fps for a couple years :) I don't do it every video though. This particular camera is about 5 months old I think!

LGR

Got a Zip Drive for xmas one year and couldn't have been happier. An extra 100mb here or there goes a long way when your only HD is 4gb...until you get the click of death as I did. Part of me wonders if I could still get onto that class action suit. I could be down for some Acronis stuff.

Vlaphor

awesome video man! I "rescued" some old ZIP disks and an internal drive from my old company years ago. No idea what they were using them for, couldn't have been used for nearly 5 years! Loved working there, they had lots of old stuff.

Dan Milner

We had a lot of those back in the day in our company, used for some backup and file transfer. But yeah, they just faded away without much notice, replaced by other media. Completely forgot about them until your video. Also, awesome T-Shirt. Hail Sithis!

Jade_of_Arc

I want a whole computer system in that indigo colored plastic. It's my woodgrain.

Steve Lovelace

Gonna be getting back into ZIP disks soon, but in my case I'll be using them with my Atari Portfolio and MSX. It's gonna be a trip.

My new favorite Oddware episode! Nailed it again! Great video! Keep it up!

Timo Schmidt

Great video! I had the parallel port version for my laptop back in the early 2000s. I even bought the "zip battery" so the drive cloud be used without the wall wart. It just piggybacked on top with a fixed swing-down power adapter. Worked pretty well. It looked like this: <a href="http://i.ebayimg.com/images/i/231225410403-0-1/s-l1000.jpg" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://i.ebayimg.com/images/i/231225410403-0-1/s-l1000.jpg</a>

I hope you still release it. Different takes on the same technology always intrigues me.

Zem Hysong

I have ATAPI, Parallel, and USB ZIP Drives still. Personal memory time... My uncle used them to store a whole bunch of games and stuff on. He passed away in 2000, so while I have archived all of them, I still go back to those original Zips and reminisce sometimes. Which reminds me... ever play Flux LE? That game was amazing.

Zem Hysong

I had one. Used it to back up a lot. It's weird when stuff you clearly remember buying becomes so dated!

60FPS camera is looking good! Is it new or have I just not noticed it before?

Zeke

You beat me to it! I've been buying up Zip Drive stuff for the last year getting ready for an episode on that.

The 8-Bit Guy

neat

Dude

I remember when I went to DeVry we uses these things.

Frederick G.

i had the parallel port version i purchased to use on my packard bell 486 66mhz... i put netscape navigator on it and it was SOOO slow to read even then.

Great video !!! I'm waiting the video about jazz disk ... lol !!! :D

We had the internal ATAPI version on an IBM Aptiva. That got moved from PC to PC as we upgraded for a long time. 😀

DGDW (Derek G. Weber)

Brings back many memories. I used those bad boys for years.

13Cubed

I was working at Staples at the beginning of the 2000s and I remember customers being in awe when they saw those 100MB floppy disks! Some even claimed that soon, we wouldn't need hard drives anymore. Yeah, right...

Frederic St-Georges

MSP?

As a support tech for an MSP in the 90s these things were the bane of my existence more than they were handy.