LGR Oddware - The Iomega ZIP Drive Experience

Oddware isn't always about obscure and failed products! Taking a look back at the ZIP 100 drives from the mid-90s, including their history, packaging, setup, and usage on a Windows 9x PC.

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● Music used in order of appearance:
Time For Spring 2, Rhodes to Heaven 2, Book of Jazz 1

[edsmith-zm]

I used to work in the graphics industry and these were essential before USB drives. Kept mountains of logos and art files and were quickly interchangeable.

[the_derpler]

I loved these things. Back in high school my friends and I would trade software on stacks of 15+ 3.5 formatted AOL floppies held together with rubber bands. Zip drives changed our lives.

[Nightweaver]

These were the best thing ever when I first started college in the late '90s (1997-99) when our Macs didn't have enough HDD space, and we were in graphics classes. We could store an entire semester's worth of projects on one or two of these bad boys and take them with us. They were virtually indestructible and made classes that much more fun when you walked in with your Zip disk and knew you were ready to go for the day. Good times.

[themetadaemon]

The best part of owning a zip drive is finding it 20 years later, having it work, and enjoying the time warp back to the late 90's.

[stars_overhead]

When I was in college, zip discs were a requirement. My college had made a deal with a computer company and there were zip drives in every college-owned computer. I got used to them in a hurry, and honestly, for quick data transfer, they were awesome. They didn't have the wait time of burning a CD, and USB was still pretty new back then, and unreliable. I loved my zip drives. My desktop had an internal. My mom's computer had a SCSI. What I loved about almost every single external zip drive was the eject button. Those things could shoot a disc across the room and hurt somebody. It was hilarious.

[marcozolo]

I'm still saving up for one to this very day

[MikeySaysGo]

I still have one of these. My old RuneScape accounts and passwords are stored on one with some Slipknot songs. Good times.

[rickkaylor]

Thanks for posting this great video and bringing back many memories. I was on the Zip Drive design committee and was the Technical Support Manager at Iomega at that time for 5 years. Previously I'd been a field sales engineer for 5 years with Iomega starting when they had the 8 inch 10Mb Bernoulli drives. My staff in Technical Support came up with the idea of having a window on the Zip drive. I had a pile of Zip and Bernoulli drives and disks that I kept for years. I posted them on Craig's List and got ZERO responses for anyone wanting to buy them. After a few weeks of posting with no results, I just threw them all in the trash. All of my Bernoulli and Zip data fit on one flash drive thus explaining why the technology became obsolete.

[BurkeyAcademy]

FYI: There is a hole on the back that you can stick a paper clip in to eject the disk with no power- similar to the ones on the front of CD drives, but takes very little pressure.

[GymbalLock]

My G4 Mac had a built-in Zip drive. I also had a SCSI for my PowerMac and a USB drive.

The worst part of the Click of Death was it would spread; If a disk got the CoD, it had to be destroyed. If the disk was put into a different drive, that drive would get the CoD. Any disk put in a CoD-affected drive would also get the CoD. It was the bubonic plague of floppy storage.

[AspirationHD]

I had an internal Zip drive installed on my computer in the late 90's. I thought these things were great. I couldn't believe they had not overtaken floppy discs. I never had any problem with the drive or any Zip Disk's I bought. Thanks for the memories.

[mitchellschoenbrun]

I got involved with Iomega in their Bernoulli Box days. I wrote and sold a driver for the Bernoulli Box for the QNX operating system, now owned by BlackBerry. When the Zip 100 come along I wrote drivers for both the SCSI and Parallel Port versions. The Parallel Port version was just a Parallel Port interface in front of SCSI. They were a really good technology at the time.

[grumbel]

Random aside: Those decade old Zip disks are still four times larger than the maximum size allowed for an email on Gmail (25MB). Email really hasn't kept up with the rest of technological evolution.

[BvousBrainSystems]

I didn't see that the video was 20+ minutes long, and I ended up watching it all without even realizing it.

Good content.

[Dannyheal]

These were so necessary as an artist. We used them until the early 2ks.

[justaman]

When my computer crashed the 3.5 years of business data entry restored from my Zip Drive was worth having it back in the day.

[Absquatula]

13:31
That transition! I loved it!
I went to lean in closer to see better and the capture footage zoomed in my face.
Been a while since I've been pleasantly startled. =D

[fuyingbro]

OMG I was actually on the r&d team on designing the zip and jazz drives. Here was the thing. iOmega came to our marketing class and asked out to come up with a design. The iOmega office was only like 2 miles from the high school. The high school had college classes from Weber University as electives for Roy High School. I was just lucky enough to be taking many college credit classes and was included in the team. Oh memories.

[WritersOnTheWall]

i was in art school when zip drive came out, it was like a miracle. we all thought it was the future and 2 years later it was gone

[boydpukalo]

I just ordered Zip, Jaz, and Rev drives in 2021 after seeing your vid and remembering fond memories of owning a Zip and Jaz drives in college in the mid 90's. Always enjoyed the spin up/writing sound of the Jaz drive. Also had a ditto tape drive. RIP Iomega