Ask Lemmy

I wish, I was young and it wasn't cheap. My pc had some alternative, maybe super disk? (it also took floppies) Didn't get any of those disks either.

My dad was a techie who always got cool software and games for his computer, way before I was even born. He still keeps his old stuff in the house.

However, last time I checked, I don't ever remember seeing a Zip disk anywhere in the house. Not even a Zip drive. It was all just floppy disks and CDs.

We had to buy our own for high school, about $5 each. They were used for CAD file storage.

A friend of mine did. He used a lot of video-stuff, so that was his way of archiving.

The drive died with the infamour click of death after a couple of years of use.

I have one still. The 124mb one I think. Its how I load samples onto my old Emu e5000 rack sampler. Havent used it in years though. Hopefully it still works.

Yeah. All my college computer animation projects were on zip drives. Guess I'll never see those again.

I had both the 100M ZIP drives (one internal, one external) as well as the 1G JAZZ drive back in the times. Not work or study, they were mine.

Yes in 2000 at a major public university we had them in all the computer labs

Yes the school district I was in for elementary thru high school really bought into ZIP and SuperDisk (I think that was the other one) for a brief perios.. Boy was that 100mb a big deal back then. This would have been around 2000

I asked on a neighborhood Facebook page recently if anyone had a zip drive in the attic I could borrow - no luck. I found a couple of disks at my old family house. Probably porn, I was(am) a horndog.

Zip drives were sadly before my time, but I actually managed to find one in the wild! A parallel port drive in clear blue plastic for $40 at a local used media shop. Just the loose drive and cable, no box or anything. Prooooobably a touch too pricey for a device that wouldn't surprise me if it had the click of death.

Honestly I do kinda miss magnetic media like that! Having a big cartridge with moving parts ya shove into a slot just felt so nice when we used floppies as a very young kid.

My first computer was an old used Mac IIvi that came with a 40mb hard drive. I was so stoked to over double my storage when I got my Zip drive. I still have a disk in a drawer that I can’t possibly get data from.

I bought them and my future-stepfather bought them around the same time. I was using them mostly for backups IIRC (I've forgotten in the intervening ~25 years). Stepfather definitely was using them for backups.

I junked a Zip drive in a job around 2010. Could not figure any good use for it.

In 1998 I considered putting an internal 120MB Superdisk into my first PC build( A "Damage Box" with a Celeron 300A overclocked to 450MHz and Riva TNT2. Shout out to Claude Damage of Ars fame) Went with a stock 3.5 floppy instead.

Yeah i worked for a company that did industrial control systems. We had a zip drive with us whenever we were in the field with all the utils for troubleshooting the equipment. It was so much better that having to lug around a desktop pc.

I still have them, and they still work! I have two drives, one external and one internal zip drive, and probably about 30 or so disks. The real awesome ones which were too expensive for my broke ass back then were the Jaz drives with their crazy 1gb disks.

They were gaining popularity in 1996-1998 I think, but starting from 1999 CD writers became affordable, and zip drives disappeared pretty quickly.

Some companies kept them around as backup solutions, but that stopped early in the 2000s as well. I think the zip cartridges disappeared from the market pretty much all at once.

My dad used to pirate games and software for us off BBSes. I swear, he would download everything he could find and put it on zip drives. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that he's got a drawer somewhere filled with all the best software 1995 had to offer.

While in audio engineering school we used all sorts of obscure data storage types, zip being one. Most were DAT tapes and digital reels (2-track, 8, 16, and 24+) with quality that would make FLAC lovers jealous, CDs were used but only for our own personal copies. We also used analog reels. We were made to learn the basics first before moving into computer audio. Fun times.

Just found an old USB Zip drive and a bunch of Zip disks in a box. Still works!

When I was in high school, I got a cd burner when they were still somewhat new. Another kid wanted me to burn some mp3s into an audio cd for him, so he lent me his external zip drive loaded up with his mp3.

I feel like zip drives only made sense from around 1995-2000. They filled a gap for writable media at the time.

Yeah they were a thing for a brief while. I still have one in a closet. Do you need one?

Graduated college in 2007, they were required by some of my graphic design professors