Man, these were everywhere for a good bit (we even had a Zip disc vending machine on campus). Brings back some fun memories. Of course, the big answer for why they vanished (spoilers) is flash drives, but this was a fun bridge technology from floppies.
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Zip drives were peak bridge tech. Floppies were too small, CDs were read only for most people, so Zip filled that perfect gap.
Then USB thumb drives showed up and just murdered the whole category.
I remember being in awe of how much space we had at our disposals lol... crazy how fast things progressed
My school had so many laying around when they stop using them. I couldn't use it myself as the connectors looked different for some reason as there were other connectors on other models. The school use to have apple computers with proprietary connectors which would explain it. It was like a 20ish pin type of connector. or maybe it had a firewire connector on there too.
Back when they came out, there were both parallel port Zip drives and SCSI port Zip drives. The former was for Windows machines, the latter for Macs. USB changed a lot, but no longer having to figure out if your device could physically connect to your computer was a huge one.
Fun fact: Iomega was basically printing money in the mid 90s. Then USB 2.0 and cheap flash storage happened and it was just over. One of the fastest tech extinctions ever.
🎵 Don’t copy that floppy. 🎶