I think if IOmega had reduced the license costs for the disks, and had disks gotten under the $5 mark, they'd have held on for close to another decade before larger USB drives displaced them.
I worked for IOmega's support call center for about a year when I was younger... mostly in the OS/2 queue which was also 2nd level support. The Jazz drives were much worse in terms of click of death, I always just RMA'd the drive and the cartridges when it happened, as nearly always the drives would damage heads and vice-versa... this was much more rare with the zip drives.
I remember a friend getting together a spare computer around 1996 or so, we managed to get everything needed to boot with just enough zip drivers for the parallel drive on a 3.5" floppy, using the zip drive in place of an hdd that he didn't yet have a spare hdd for. Was definitely interesting at the time.
I also remember first installing NT4 from a zip drive copy. Those later BBS and early internet days are some times I remember very fondly.
sgbeal 21 hours ago [-]
Good times... i once used a 1.44mb floppy as a springboard to boot Linux from a parallel-port ZIP drive. It was slow as molasses but it worked. The ZIP disks cost something like 100 DM (approx. 50 Euros) each at the time for 100 (120?) MB.
orionblastar 1 days ago [-]
I used Parallel port Zip Drives to install Windows 95 on PCs without a CD-ROM by copying the Windows 95 CD-ROM to the Zip Drive.
calmbonsai 1 days ago [-]
SAME! Somewhere in storage is a shoe-box that, essentially, captures my personal and professional life circa '95 as gigs of Zip disks.
Rendered at 11:40:17 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
I worked for IOmega's support call center for about a year when I was younger... mostly in the OS/2 queue which was also 2nd level support. The Jazz drives were much worse in terms of click of death, I always just RMA'd the drive and the cartridges when it happened, as nearly always the drives would damage heads and vice-versa... this was much more rare with the zip drives.
I remember a friend getting together a spare computer around 1996 or so, we managed to get everything needed to boot with just enough zip drivers for the parallel drive on a 3.5" floppy, using the zip drive in place of an hdd that he didn't yet have a spare hdd for. Was definitely interesting at the time.
I also remember first installing NT4 from a zip drive copy. Those later BBS and early internet days are some times I remember very fondly.