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This mint condition Zip drive box lists requirements like System 8.5 for Mac, and Pentium 100 for Wintel, and touts the Zip Drive's support for "new" USB -- That pegs the date no earlier than 1997-1998. It boggles the mind that people might be hanging on to this stuff for real, for 15 years. There was no corresponding Zip Drive in the dumpster, so either the box outlived the hardware, or someone is still backing up their stuff in teaspoon-sized portions (100 MB, maybe 250 MB), or, are we perhaps seeing a new fad among the well-to-do? Are people going on Ebay and buying the packaging for obsolete, antique electronics, or is there an industry to produce painstakingly-accurate facsimile reproductions? -- all so people can throw it away? I, for one, wouldn't be surprised.

Zip drives are certainly a thing of the past -- completely superseded in the first years of the 21st Century by flash drives -- but when they were introduced in 1994, they were a revolutionary innovation. They changed the rules for portable storage devices. Before inexpensive Zip drives, there were a few options for backing up large volumes of data. These are the ones I remember from the early 1990s:

• Tape drives were the only removable storage option in the early 1990s which could handle gigabytes of data (excepting actual hard drives). The linear nature of tape made them slow to search, and the tape, as I recall, was susceptible to damage from stretching.


• Bernoulli drives were invented by Iomega in 1982; by the time I first saw them, 10 years later, they were the favoured choice of graphic designers (Mac users). The cartridges came in various capacities, up to 230 MB by 1994. They had a reputation for delicacy -- they could fail if a big truck drove by your apartment.


• SuperDisks were a 3M technology acquired from Iomega, according to Wikipedia. They had a capacity of 120 MB, were the same size as standard 3.5" floppy disks, and offered "theoretical" backwards-compatibility with 3.5" floppies, in that a SuperDisk drive could read standard 1.4 MB floppies, under certain conditions. I remember the hype, but never knew anyone who bought one.


• Flopticals were the same size as 3.5" floppies, had a 21 MB capacity, and the floptical drive could read/write 800 KB, and 1.4 MB floppies. Sounded good, but, again, few takers.

Before Zip drives the available storage options were really expensive. In graphic design, regular 1.4 MB floppies, and Bernoulli disks were the only choices -- we had to supply files to service bureaus which output to the final film we supplied to printers. Refreshing my memory, this NYT article from 1991 says a Iomega Bernoull 90 drives cost $1,149 US, including one free 90-megabyte cartridge. Extra cartridges cost $229 US each. Connector kits added $265 US for Wintel PCs, and $49 US for Macs.

By comparison, the original Zip 100, introduced in 1994, cost about $200 US/CAN, and the Zip disks cost about $20 US/CAN each. Guess what everyone switched to? And when I say everyone, I don't mean just graphic designer. The new Zip drive and the new "Inter-Net" thing, with it's "World Wide Web," added up to a perfect storm for Iomega. The Net encouraged people to buy computers, share files, and download, download, download. The cheap, capacious Zip drive was the perfect way store all that stuff, in, inexpensive, 95 MB portions.

The Zip drive was so compelling, it easily survived a first generation manufacturing flaw that saw drives fail, and destroy data, in large numbers, with what became known as the "click of death." I had one of those. The store was nice enough to replace it.

In 2004 -- when I became homeless -- I was still able to sell my Zip drive, and about 50 disks, along with my G4 tower, and other Apple hardware, on consignment through the Mac Market. I got about $800 CAN for the lot (ouch!) -- the disks went for about $2 CAN each. All the same, Zip drives were several years obsolete by then. Click the images to enlarge them.

Some more trashed vintage computer packaging ►