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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Zip drives are certainly a thing of the past -- completely superseded in the first years of the 21st Century by flash drives -- but when they were introduced in 1994, they were a revolutionary innovation.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: