Back in 1995, PC users were “stuck” with conventional 1.44MB floppy disks , which were also tremendously slow. Fortunately, a new technology emerged, ZIP disks , which not only had 100 MB capacity but were also much faster, representing a huge jump in performance. In this article we are going to tell you the history of this type of unit, and why 25 years later, although they have disappeared from the consumer market, they are still used at the business level.
Compared to standard 1995 floppy disks, ZIP drives came as a revelation, as unlike floppy disks, they allowed ordinary users to back up their hard drives and transfer large files with ease.
The history of ZIP drives
At their launch, they were sold at retail for about 35,000 pesetas (about 200 euros to change, although with inflation we would speak rather of about 350 euros at the moment), and ZIP disks were sold for about 3,000 pesetas (about 20 euros to change) each unit.
Originally, ZIP drives were available in two versions, one that used the PC’s parallel port ( LPT ) to connect and therefore functioned as an external drive, and another that used a much faster internal SCSI interface. ZIP proved to be an industry success in its first year on the market, and in fact its creator, Iomega, struggled to meet the demand for both drives and disks.
Compared to the standards of the time, the industrial design of ZIP drives arrived as a breath of fresh, modern air. With its deep indigo color it stood out in a time when almost all PCs had that hideous beige-beige color. Small and lightweight, the ZIP drives were approximately 7.2 x 5.3 x 1.5 inches in size, and weighed quite little that the LPT drives were very portable.
The design distanced itself from everything that existed at the time with details such as the six rubber feet that allowed the unit to be placed both vertically and horizontally, its power connector was angled to take up less space, and also a small transparent window in the upper part allowed to see the label of the inserted ZIP disk without having to remove it.
Subsequently, Iomega introduced a third variant of these ZIP drives that fit the 5.25-inch bays of standard desktop PCs, but although these were faster, external drives were always more popular.
ZIP disks
After formatting an original 100 MB ZIP disk (on MS-DOS or Windows), they had a capacity of approximately 96 MB, which means that you could store around 70 1.44 MB floppy disks inside it like nothing. . Measuring 4 x 4 x 0.25 inches, they were only slightly larger than traditional 3.5-inch floppy disks back then, only they were much sturdier too.
The operation of these ZIP disks was the same as that of floppy disks: they had inside a magnetic drive that rotated, but in this case it did so at no less than 2,968 RPM, much faster than floppy disks and therefore delivered performance very superior.
Throughout its life, the ZIP brand had three disk sizes. Following the initial launch of drives with 100MB capacity disks, Iomega released a 250MB drive in 1999 that cost $ 199 at the time, just like the first drive drives. In 2002 the company released the 750MB ZIP 750 for $ 180, and these drives were also backward compatible with the 100 and 250MB ZIP disks.
In the image above you can see the three ZIP units that there were: top left the ZIP 100, top right the ZIP 250 and finally the bottom one in the center is the last one, the ZIP 750.
Why did the ZIP drives disappear?
Actually, we can say that they have disappeared from the consumer market but they have not completely disappeared or stopped being manufactured, since by inheritance they are still used in the business market despite their low capacity (by modern standards, of course, because in those times were unbelievably great).
The introduction of low-cost media and CD-R drives, generally readable with any standard CD-ROM drive , began to consume the ZIP market share of removable backups. Companies also began to spread local area networks (LANs) in increasing numbers, allowing file transfers without the need for removable media. In other words, data and backup servers began to be used.
By then floppy drives and 1.44 MB floppy disks had practically disappeared, and in the 2010s the arrival of DVDs also ended up condemning ZIP disks in the consumer market, as they provided removable media just as much durable but with a much higher capacity and higher performance. This coupled with the proliferation of file servers, USB pen drives and even home NAS for backup, made ZIP drives no longer make sense.
Surprisingly even today ZIP drives are not quite dead as various companies (especially banks and aviation companies) still base their infrastructure on these small drives so they are still being manufactured.
