Where I was it went from 3.5" floppies to USB drives. (There were CDs, but not as easy for things like schoolwork.)
ZIP needed a whole ecosystem of drives, so did you have that?
I still have a couple drives and a bunch of disks. I keep telling myself I’ll resurrect my college homework for a laugh one day. Unfortunately it’s hard to find a reasonably modern motherboard to hook them up (let alone finding drivers), so in the closet they sit.
You can find adapters/dongles for a lot of things.
I had trouble getting mine to work in Win10, but worked perfectly when I plugged it into an Intel Mac for some reason.
Pretty sure I still have the zip drive. It has a scsi connector, but pretty sure there’s a scsi card in there somewhere too. They were only popular for a small slice of time. Just like those mini tape drives with the cartridges that were about the size of a tictac container. I probably have that too.
Zip drives made sense tho.
Just lost out to thumb drives and better Internet speeds.
I’m still salty minidiscs didn’t take off tho. 20 years ago an iPod cost the same as a mini disc player. But it only took 2 maybe 3 discs to surpass it’s storage. And you could even use a line in to dupe a CD if you wanted.
It wasn’t as fast as ripping, but the convenience factor was huge and compared to 56k Napster, didn’t really take that long.
Minidisc was super cool. I never had one, but some of my college friends did and it just seemed so much better than a Discman.
I’m pretty sure Zip lost out to CD-Rs and -RWs before the thumb drives and better Internet speeds showed up.
Also, I’m not salty at all about minidiscs because fuck Sony and all their proprietary formats.
If I got to pick one new recorder and one new player from the entire MD range…
Recorder: Either the MZ-NH1 or the MZ-RH1
Player: Either the MZ-E10, SJ-MJ7 or the DMC-Q55
Minidiscs absolutely took off, the format was introduced back in 1992, and discontinued in 2013, that is more than two decades.
They were common in Europe and Japan, I sadly never had one during the height of popularity, but got two used ones back in 2014.
Minidisc is probably the most visualy attractive music format I know of, most players and recorders just look fantastic.
I very nearly bought one back in the day. Instead I opted for an mp3 player with compact flash storage. I believe I was tired of my cd based walkman’s tendency to skip when I was moving so I wanted a smaller, non-moving drive.
Then my dumbass bought one of those compact flash drives with an internal platter harddrive.
My first MP3 player was a Creative Nomad MuVo 64MB, I was one of the first in my school with an MP3 player and since it also was a USB stick I was also one of the first with a USB drive in my school.
But it was nowhere near as sexy as the minidisc recorders and players were
Did minidiscs skip?
If you tried really hard it was supposed to be technically possible.
But I never had it happen
The coolest thing about mini disc was how it looked like next-level spy shit in movies.
I have one still new in the box somewhere. I should find a PC museum to donate it to. Or throw it in the trash. Why do I hoard this crap?
I had one at work at one time, and I saved a disc for a long time as a keepsake, but I lost it.
Dont forget jazz drives, superdisks, syquest drives, Bernoulli drives, and cdr/rw, dvd+/-r, dvd-ram and tape drives!
I had a CD burner made by Iomega. ;)
I had a Sony 1x burner with scsi connector. I still have some new 1x cdr’s somewhere. I remember my work buying a box of them at what I recall were $20/disc. A box of 100 was a serious chunk of change. And even at 1x I had to have a dedicated pc to burn them. Nothing else could be running especially a screensaver, and if the stream of data was interrupted you had a nice new coaster.
Yep. I’ve used 5 1/4s, 3.5s, Zip, CDs, CD-Rs, CD-RWs, DVDs, DVD-Rs, DVD-RWs, BD, BD-R, BD-RW, Thumb/Flash, SD, Micro SD, and CF. The only one I can think of that I never personally used were Tapes, but I know people who did. They kind of came and went in a hurry it felt like to me.
I use LTO8 tapes every day in 2024 lol
What about optilithic data rods?
One of the weirder ones was Orb drives/disks.
I still have this and a zip drive in a box. I’d probably need to see if the USB to serial adapter I have works with it though.
My first computer, a Commodore 64, was purchased with a tape drive because we were too broke for a 1541 5.25" disk drive.
I could start a game loading, go eat dinner, come back and it would just be getting around to being done loading.
Same for me, but add:
- the big ass 8” floppies
- Jaz drives
- Bernoulli drives
So many Bernoulli’s
I had never heard of those until now. 5 1/4 disk size with 230 mb sounds pretty sweet
I had a cassette drive on my TI 99/4a.
Now get off my lawn!
I don’t even have a lawn but they need to get off the lawn still!
I had a SCSI Zip drive, then later a USB version. Didn’t really need it for myself too much but it helped out for the rare times someone needed to give me something on that format or when I was helping someone with data recovery/data transfer.
Also used to see them around in computer labs & such so they weren’t that rare.
I had one (more than one actually) as it could store soooo much more data than a floppy disk and I needed it to move data (and pirated software) around. At work we had magneto-optic drives with a whopping 240 megs of data, IIRC
I owned one of the original external units and later a couple of the 3.5" internal drives. Just tossed some discs and that original drive in the trash 2 years ago
That was the path I took, but I remember a few college friends and several professors had a Zip drive, as did many of the computers in the lab. By the time I had the money and the need for something like that, 1Gb flash drives were cheaper.
I had a zip drive. Eventually it got the click of death though. First PC had 5 1/4 and 3.5in drives.
I had a SparQ drive - I did the sums, and it was the most cost-effective. A whole gigabyte per cartridge! Room for everything! I still have it in a box somewhere. It has some weird old connection… ah, parallel port according to Wikipedia.
The mad thing about it was that the drive malfunctioned a few months after I bought it. I took it back to the retailer and discovered it had been discontinued. But they still had one out the back, so the assistant swapped it for my defective one. Phew! In hindsight I should have asked for a refund. But hey, with two 1Gb cartridges I had enough storage for a lifetime!
The sound of the “Click of Death” still haunts me.
We had Jazz drives too, which just failed and caused you to lose a larger amount of data than a zip.
Yeah it was like an accidental physical computer virus of sorts. Crazy how it was contagious.
I was in college and working in a student computer lab at the height of zipdrives. There was a gap where floppies were way too small, CD writers were either molasses slow or not in a public university’s budget, and USB was uncommon. SCSI was “da bomb!” in the parlance of the time.
Zip disks were one of the main avenues of piracy between students.
I tried them, they never seemed quite reliable enough. We used DAT tapes, CR-ROMs, and then just hard drives. At first hard drives in external enclosures then HD docks with bare drives.
