Iomega Clik: Little Disk, Huge Failure
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- Опубліковано 2 лют 2023
- Throughout the 1990s, Iomega was the darling of the storage industry with its various, successful disk formats. But while technology was rapidly changing at the end of the decade, the company stuck to what it knew best with its Clik/PocketZip disk -- which ultimately would lead to its downfall.
Sources:
"One Size Stores All," PC Magazine, March 9, 1999.
PocketZip disk photo: www.fileformat.info/media/cli...
"Zip Drive Death Click Is for Real," PC World, May 1998.
"Watchdog," Maximum PC, July 2001.
HipZip packaging photo: / iomega-fotoshow-hipzip...
"Ultimate MP3 Showdown," Maximum PC, March 2001.
Agfa ePhoto CL30 Clik photo: www.journaldulapin.com/2020/1...
PocketZip USB drive box photo: / 1526220163917283329
"Iomega Announces New 100MB PocketZip Drive," web.archive.org/web/200402201...
"More Room to Store," PC Magazine, January 19, 1999.
"Iomega's 10GB Peerless Drive System," Maximum PC, August 2001.
"Personal Storage," PC Magazine, March 21, 2000.
"Iomega takes Q2 drubbing, plans layoffs," Computerworld, www.computerworld.com/article...
"First Looks," PC Magazine, March 2008.
"EMC to acquire Iomega," www.dell.com/en-us/dt/corpora...
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The click of death was like a hardware virus. Damage a disk by a faulty drive, put that disk into another drive, damage that drive and so on. Zip drives had a massive failure rate. Reliability was low. Cost was high.
I worked for a household name PC manufacturer in those days. If a customer called in and you could see there was an internal iomega drive on the specification of their computer, you pretty much knew what they were calling about before they said anything.
The fact that it could be “transmitted” via hardware was kind of horrifying at the time.
IMO, it wasn't actually that unreliable. It's just that the carnage from a damaged disk could be really wide-spread. It was highly "contagious." Other than that, the drives and media were actually pretty reliable.
The main issue is that the heads were so small -- which they had to be, at those capacities. A physically deformed disk could snag the heads and damage them, which could cause damage to any other disks inserted into that drive, and so on and so forth. This didn't happen in floppy drives because the heads were so chonky and stout, but any other dense-capacity format would've likely had similar problems. The only way to prevent that would be to use a physical medium that wasn't prone to deformation, like Jaz, but that made the Jaz format considerably more expensive. (Albeit, while also allowing it to store quite a bit more.)
I agree with Nick. The drives were actually fairly reliable, it's the fact that they destroyed the media once they did go bad that caught everyone's attention. It's interesting you mention the internal drive because I've never had an internal drive get the click of death, while the portal ones were less reliable for me (and then companies in worked at, where almost every computer had a drive). I had an internal zip drive that still worked up until a couple years ago before I got rid of it in all my older zip disks after I archived them.
I had a SCSI Zip Drive that worked fine for a while, until the dreaded “click of death” happened. The drive heads and the disk that it was reading were all destroyed. I later got an internal Zip Drive that never had any problems.
I worked at a small firm with 6 PCs and a win2000 server and the zip drive filled the space between floppy and tape backups perfectly, back when writing CDs for backup was quite new, and time consuming!
The format was ideal for the times even if the technology was unreliable - that said we had 3 zip drives and a whole bunch of zip disks and never had a single problem in the year or two I remember using them almost exclusively for important files. I had no idea about the click of death until later.
I worked at Iomega in the mid 90's. Zip and Jaz. They laid us off and sent everything to Malaysia long before Clik.
I was all in on everything Iomega back in the day. I'm still waiting for my mail-in rebate on my zip drive.
Maybe I was too young or not paying attention, it felt like Iomega blew up and was everywhere. If you had a Mac, you had at least one Iomega drive.
Little disk, huge flop.
No you didn't.
@@deadsetmassascared Couldn't resist.
The true floppy disk
Same as yours?
"she"
I'm fortunate enough to remember iomega back in their prime. I live in Roy Utah, less than a block away from their former world headquarters. My friend in elementary his mother worked doing product manuals in the early 90s up until the Lenovo acquisition. This device and the USB cd burner that failed to gain popularity were why they were losing income like crazy. I remember testing out new hardware and software from around 1995 all the way to 2002.. this is also where I got to play marathon 2 for the very first time.. in the waiting room of their testing facility after school in 1996..
@@parkman29 why not? Utah has its own 'silicon slopes' area to the south that have divisions of Oracle, Adobe, SanDisk, etc.. 3 million people live in the ogden-salt lake-provo metro area. I remember when fields separated the metro areas, now they're talking 5-7 lane freeway heading north to Ogden in the next couple of years.
@@parkman29 I worked for their service desk/call center in the early 2000s in Indianapolis, and yes, headquarters was in Roy, Utah. Getting a call from the 801 area code was frightening, since it could be one of the big guns. Sadly we had to shut down because another client of ours, HTC, was consolidating call centers, and took their customer support desk and merged it with their service desk, leaving us with not enough capacity to keep a call center going.
My favorite story was one we heard often, with a twist. Iomega was selling portable hard drives, and everyone who had a hard drive fail seemed to have the same story. "We want data recovery!!!" We of course would respond, "Did you back up your data?" "Yes!" "Then where is it?" "Your drive was our backup!" "If you didn't have another copy somewhere else, you didn't have a backup." This of course would trigger the response that the user agreement doesn't include data recovery, and you should always have a backup, too bad, so sad, etc. (We didn't say that, but that's unfortunately what most customers heard.) Data recovery was some insanely small add=-on amount like $10 more at purchase, a true bargain.
I was working in conflict resolution at the time, and I had heard hundreds of sob stories about lost data and not being able to afford data recovery. A guy came in, considered our policy BS, and got fed up. He sent us a picture of his drive with a shotgun blast through the center for effect (it was probably drilled first) and the message, "Fixed it!" Yes, no more click of death with that drive, that's for sure.
loosing ?
I also worked in Iomega documentation and know your friend’s mother very well.
@@parkman29 I worked there!!!
While it was a shame that Iomega as a company failed. The reliability issues the Zip and Jaz drives had really hurt their credibility with both individuals and companies. I can still remember the band KMFDM lost an entire album during recording in the late 90s as the Jaz drive they were using messed up multiple disks of recordings.
Brilliantly obscure fact :) i like it!
Yep, I bought a Zip drive and I don't think I had a single disk that stood up to any use. They all failed hard and quickly. I had a SuperDisk drive and that thing was awesome. 120mb of data and I could read regular floppies in it as well.
@@SmallSpoonBrigade Superdisk was a significant improvement. I used the Zip 100 for backups, and it was a big hassle to use it, plug it into printer port. Didn't have any fail though.
I was honored with the CoD on both my personal Jaz and Zip drives, in rather close order. Never considered buying Iomega again.
Kind of same story happened to us in the early 2000's.
Had a gig in a club in Shinjuku, Tokyo.
At that time we didn't use a computer so instead of bringing all the synths we used in studio, we would sample them and bring just a Ensoniq ASR-10 sampler along with a Roland TR909 for main drum duties and a Roland TB303 for live acid tweaking.
So basically the sampler was responsible for 90% of the sounds of our gig.
And all the samples were stored on a ZIP disk.
That day, when we rehearsed in the afternoon, everything was fine.
We were scheduled to play around 1a.m.
We turned all the gear on about 30min before and when we tried to load the samples in the sampler, the ZIP failed...to a point that we couldn't even eject the disk so we couldn't even try to use our backup disk.
We were screwed...
The next day we switched to MO disks and never used Iomega stuff again.
I worked for Best Buy in the late 90s. When I think back on how insanely expensive storage was back then, it's a astounding. It seemed like every other week we were getting some new type of storage in stock. We'd learn about it, sell some got insane prices, then most would disappear.
Best Buy
Cheap people kept using film, we already did flash memory !
Why sell crap, Big Box crap stores !
@@lucasRem-ku6eb Big box stores sold exactly what customers wanted to buy back then.
I remember when *everyone* in college had some form of Iomega drive (Zip, Jazz, etc), but i never saw a Click
In 1999 or maybe 2000, iomega was handing out the dev kits like candy in an attempt to get OEMs to adopt the format. I worked for a digital picture frame company (Digi-Frame, second picture frame on the US market after Sony! :)) in this era and remember hooking the devkit (basically a bare version of the PCMCIA drive) up to one of our firmware dev boards, tweaking the access timing in my filesystem code to get it to work, and saying "Welp... it works... now what? It's like being the first guy to own a video phone - until everyone adopts it, who cares?"
Actually, our last disk format wasn't Clik, but REV. We got a little traction there - even being the storage media for some Grass Valley professional cameras, but it just wasn't enough. We were acquired by EMC because our NAS drives filled a niche to them for SMB (for EMC "Small Business" meant anything less than like 20,000 employees). Our SMB NAS drives were targeted to *real* small businesses. That part of us was sold to Lenovo (where I am now, as the last person remaining from the Iomega acquisition).
Great video, but this immediately makes me think of IBM/Hitachi Microdrive. Hard drives the size of CompactFlash-II cards? It did in fact exist.
For pre SD cards age mini PCs with a spare PCMCIA slot, the Click drive was ABSOLUTELY awesome! Zero footprint expandable storage that you Click to swap out 40MB at a time. Loved these for my IBM PC110 and early Toshiba Librettos back the day when solid state 32MB CF cards cost a small fortune!
I love watching your videos and learning about the history of tech in an interesting and informative way, looking forward to the next one!
Plus a friendly voice.
I helped Iomega launch the clik! and associated devices in the UK...we worked on the radio side of things. At the time, it was a fun and quite useable option. I still have the player somewhere!
Thanks for the video.
Iomega perfected the click of death and then releases a product called clik.
A friend and I had zip drives and both had the click of death to the point my friend gave it the fist of doom and that ended the click problem.
Oh man I had one of these (PCMCIA). It was mostly useless because nobody else had one and I didn't want to buy another one just for carrying around for desktops.
Yeah, to make them useful you had to buy 2, making them silly expensive.
Your videos are always a walk down memory lane. I recall liking these Clik discs when they came out. I bought the PCMCIA adapter and had a music player that used them. I too, eventually grew weary of the 40MB limit as I could barely fit a whole album on a single disk and moved onto recordable CD and flash memory media.
Ah yes, PCMCIA, back when geeks got to actually name stuff and everything didn't need to be pronounceable as an acronym. I always loved that People Can't Memorized Computer Industry Acronyms was an acceptable choice that lasted as long as it did. OTOH, Technology Without An Interesting Name, was pronounceable and did wind up lasting longer.
The idea that you'd release a new product named after your current product's biggest flaw still baffles me.
I still have several of these, and they still work! I had the Agfa digital camera that used these as their storage medium. Ah, good times! 🙂
Love these videos, keep them coming! The advances of technology (and competition) during this period of time is so fascinating.
I clearly remember seeing an ad for these in Computer Shopper back in the day when it was branded, Clik, and I actually thought it was kind of cool, as in high school I was taking Computer Network Tech classes, and actually carried my 100MB Parallel Zip Drive in my bag with me to class, along with 4 disk, as I got tired of dealing with floppies, and the desktop Gateway computers we used in class where basically ours till the HDD's got reformatted at the end of the school year, plus my school was one of the few places in my county that had internet faster than 56K dialup, and I would download whatever I needed/wanted when we had free time in class.
Having said that, after having 2 Zip drives fail on me, after I got out of school with my first full time job, I moved onto carrying 64MB, 128MB, and 256MB CF cards in my bag, along with a USB 1.1(later USB 2.0) CF card reader to download what I needed at work, as most of my area was still stuck on 56K dialup till mid 2008. I still have the CF cards along with the reader, and they still work lol!
My first mp3 player was an Iomega Hipzip, which used the Clik disks. My prevailing feelings were 40mb not feeling big enough, and the disks not being very reliable. I originally thought 40mb per disk would work out better than having fixed solid state 64 or 128mb, but it just ended up breaking within like 1.5 years until I got a NetMD player instead.
I had one too, but I didn't get full use out of it because I was pirating on 56K dial up and I didn't have enough CDs to encode (most of my music collection was on cassette, and I had only begrudgingly began to buy CDs because music shops stopped stocking cassettes). I liked it because the storage per MB was cheaper than all the other MP3 players at the time where you had to buy RAM sticks or whatever for them. Of course when I ripped CDs I ended up doing it at super high-quality so I couldn't get the whole CD on a disc. I didn't really know what I was doing, nor did I have a lot of money to buy a lot of disks, despite them being cheaper.
I was actually working at RadioShack at the time and when they discontinued the discs they sold them for dirt cheap, but for whatever reason I didn't buy them.
I really liked the format in theory, but I wasn't quite a big enough for the music person at that time to have a collection to take advantage, and little factors like that blocked my motivation. I never used mine enough to have one fail.
A few years later, in college, I got a first gen iPod shuffle (I paid for the one with the higher storage) and listened to streaming internet radio on Pandora, and any song that I thought was interesting, would immediately pirate (including possibly all the music of that band). I still had the hip zip, and I felt a quiet regret that it never got much use, after I had made such a big deal to my parents that one Christmas that was the thing that I wanted most.
I got a lot of use out of that first gen shuffle, later upgrading to a fourth gen shuffle, and finally a fourth gen nano. But I have both the nano and the shuffle, I made the shuffle my dedicated workout music player and my nano for general use.
In reliability the HipZip was the Land Rover among mp3 players
Around that time my parents let it slip that they were planning on getting me some similar mp3 player for my birthday. Immediately I was like, "Oh, no, please don't." and then I had to explain that mp3 players "aren't ready yet" and why. That was a weird conversation because I really wanted an mp3 player, just not any of the ones that existed at the time.
@@mackie5004 Mechanically, the disks and player should have broken 15 different ways.
I worked in a company that heavily used Iomega's last unique product - the Rev removable hard disk cartridge system. Interesting concept, we used them to replace SCSI tape drives for customer backups; when they went off the market anyone with broadband was convinced to move to a remote backup solution and the rest had to faff around with USB hard drives that were less reliable and would randomly change drive letter etc.
I don’t know… plenty of small businesses used LTO tape drives during that era. Much more reliable.
I never had a Clik drive but the ZipCD brought back some memories, it was the first CD burner I owned. I found a good deal on one back in 2000 and it came with Mac software (probably Toast), which not all drives did back then, so I got it to use with my Powerbook G3. It served me well for a few years but eventually died and was replaced by a DVD burner.
Nothing better than a retro tech video first thing in the morning!
Iomega made so many funny formats. I always loved the Jaz drives, and so when I built my new PC this last October I built in the drive of the Jaz's successor: the Rev. It's wonderfully infuriating in that it shows as a CD drive in Windows so it'll only let you "burn" things to this hard drive in UDF format. It holds 35GB a disk and I have yet to find a reason for having it.
I have an old crt tv for no rational reason, but I enjoy the vintage tube technology somehow and watch 80ties tv series on it.
I put a rather new BD-RE slot-in drive in a build. To this day I don't know what I was thinking there. I have maybe burnt three audio CDs with it.
I have a SCSI JAZ for my Akai S6000 sampler, perfect companion.
@@dglcomputers1498 Besides the name, any SCSI-to-SD or SCSI-to-CF adapter would be a far better match. The era of rotating media is just over - HDDs currently fight for their lives, and the rest is basically niché.
The REV drive could be written to normally, but it needed the IomegaWare driver to do that. Otherwise, Windows just saw it as an optical drive.
I remember only finding out about the Zip disk "click of death" while searching for this on the internet. 😆
I like that you covered that, I bet I wasn't the only one who typed iomega click into the search engine instead of clic.
I can still hear that noise. Bad times.
Great video - brings me back to work in the 90s! Thanks!
As someone who lived through it all - I'm getting on in years - I have to say that this video is phenomenally crafted.
I love learning about this devices that never ever reached our country. I never ever read about this things. This channel is platinum, worths more than gold.
My dad was one of the engineers that created Click Drive... good video...
Iomega tried to market a Peerless Drive as a N64 accessory. Whether they actually had a Nintendo 64 compatible drive or not is anyone's guess. I lean towards it being a concept for marketing purposes but it was the last time I remember Iomega trying to sell a consumer digital storage medium as a must have accessory.
If you look closely at the pictures of the CES display, it was literally just a Peerless Drive shoved into the N64's cartridge slot. It's extremely likely that no serious development for it happened and they just had it there as a visualization of the Peerless Drive's touted portability and flexibility.
Ah Iomega, trying to find a spot in the market...
Sometimes it worked, with the ZIP they had a lovely market. For a while it was a pretty good way to store 100Mbyte or 250Mbyte of data. You could fit whole games on there... multiple graphical projects!
But this, this was pushing it too hard.
and when the drive failed and damaged your disk, you lost it all, and back then that was a lot of data to lose. Because the disks were so expensive, you likely had no second copy. If you did, you had no second drive. Because the drives were expensive, no one else you knew likely had a drive either, but if they did, they didn't want you putting a disk in their drive which would likely damage their drive too!
There was nothing else like it though; the convenience of a floppy but with a useful capacity. Sure you could burn a CD but it was time consuming and one-way, sure you could use a tape drive but not every small office had the budget for that either. As a portable, removable storage format it was a game changer and nothing really did the same job until USB storage came along. If Zip had been technically flawless, the company might still be around today.
The nomad was FAR bigger, and had durability issues. The hip zip was rugged AF. I had one that I used while mountain biking. The number of times it fell onto pavement or trails was easily in the dozens, but it just kept working. I could carry a few disks with me and have music for a few hours. It fit a role that wouldn't be filled for a few years. That said, it was definitely a commercial failure. Had it been marketed as a rugged device it might have seen more market share. Mine worked flawlessly up until I just stopped using it because I stopped biking. MP3 CD's fit what I needed for in car needs, so the hip zip went into a drawer never to be used again. I have many fond memories of cycling around town with the hip zip shoved in a small saddle bag under my seat. Cake and Blur never sounded so good! :D
The Minolta Dimage 5 was my first good digital camera. only 3.3 megapixels, but the 7 element GT lens was its strong point! It captured great photos. The 7x optical zoom was fantastic! It was called a "Prosumer" Digital camera. 35-250mm (equivalent)
I found the USB version in your video as well as the other USB version into which you insert the PCMCIA drive into last year and added to my collection. I dont have any memory of PocketZip in the market after being an early adopter of Zip 100, then Jazz drives while in college in the mid 1990's. I added them all back to my collection over the last 2 years, including Peerless and Rev drives. Cool technology. Zip 100 was a revolutionary godsend when it came out at a time before thumbdrives, SD cards, and even CF. All we had were floppies at the time. Awesome video. Keep them coming.
A vintage Maxtor box is certainly a good way to start the video 🙂I always found it funny that Iomega dared name their new drives Clik! after the click-of-death fiasco on the ZIP drives...
Hi Colin, I find your videos relaxing and learning quite a bit from them. I was wondering if you would consider making a video on Lightscribe disc's and drives.
This was a nostalgia trip… back in 1996, Zip drives were just the coolest thing to get. Then come 1999 and 2000, all of a sudden everyone was burning their own CDs and zip drives just faded away except in maybe schools.
ahhh, I know im gonna have a good Friday when I enjoy one of these videos during my lunch break :)
I lived through this entire era. I had a zip drive but never went in for the Clik. My first digital camera was the awful Apple Quicktake that didn't even have removable media. My next one was an Olympus Camedia and then a Nikon D-100.
They got the click of death! Those disks were just redundant especially when Compact Flash and Smart Media were just more reliable and had no moving parts. Also Iomega should’ve embraced flash memory cards in the early 2000s, they would’ve still been in business!
I love the zip discs in the day and I always remember seeing the Little click discs in the catalogs and things and wondered what they would be like what they were used for.
Amazing video, one of your best produced ones to date. I wonder how you do those smooth focus pulls. Specific hardware? Or a technique I don't know that works miracles?
I miss my Zip drive. I remember downloading MP3’s off Napster to a Zip drive and taking them home from U of M computer lab.
I can remember seeing these in computer magazines at the time. I also saw them in shops, but I worked in London's West End. I'd invested in Zip discs and had personally encountered the infamous "click of death" so the name of the new product raised an eyebrow! Even without the unfortunate name, though, the reliability issue with Zip had made me wary of Iomega. That aside, Clik! felt like a cool little format that nobody would want. It felt like it was intended to be a mass-market consumer product, but who was going to invest in a proprietary format?
The HipZip brings back a lot of memories. I hated it. But it was my first MP3 player, and I won it in a raffle, the first and last time I've ever won something. The storage medium was too expensive for the time and yes, it held very few MP3 files. It was a good concept since some MP3 players were using physical hard drives that could fail with shock. It was just very limited in capacity and too expensive to keep up with. The batteries weren't even replaceable.
As 'bad' as those floppy cameras were, you have to consider that for the film you didn't know what you had until you got the film developed. Floppy-based cameras allowed you to actually look at your pictures and determine what you had on the fly. Having a stack of floppies and a couple of batteries might seem terrible in the age of smartphones, but at the time it was still acceptable, especially for businesses.
Makes sense, yes - like an Estate Agent who needed decent photos of a property - they could instantly see what they are getting, and not have the hassle of finding a photo lab.
@@museonfilm8919 my freight company used them for freight damage claims. Insurance adjusters used them. I still have some old Mavicas and they still work. Not bad for tech that's close to a quarter century old.
R.I.P Iomega. I lost so much data because of you! No tears from me...
A fascinating piece of history, and a great video. I was genuinely surprised that the brand lasted as long as it did. Before things like the Zip drive with the Click of Death, they got a pretty poor reputation in some circles for their tape drives that were designed to hook up to a floppy disk interface which would sometimes just not work due to poor hardware compatibility.
I had the PCMCIA card. It was amazing how they could fit an entire drive into that small envelope.
People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms
Awww! Nostalgia! @1:01 on the right, Creative Nomad II. My very first MP3 player! Loved that it had a built-in FM tuner (which worked pretty well!) and you could use a 64MB SmartMedia card in it and it took 2 AA batteries which lasted a very long time. I friggin' loved that little thing until the hard-disk based MP3 players came out (Creative Nomad Jukebox Zen Xtra had 60GB of storage!). Thanks for the walk down memory lane!
I had no idea this video would make me so nostalgic. I started working in TV/digital media/photography in the late 90's. I just love zip and jaz drives. I wish devices today were as aesthetically pleasing and durable.
Great video, Colin! I had a Zip drive when it came out. I loved it. Although the disks were bloody expensive!
I think if Zip or Clik had come out late 80s, early 90s, then Iomega would have been a lot more successful, and probably be still in business today.
I worked for Iomega in both Zip and Jazz drive/disk production. Cindy Lauper's lawsuit, the CD burner, and moving production over seas is what killed the company!!!
That's a shame, the CD Burner was actually pretty decent. But, given how crap the Zip disks had gotten, I can't blame people for avoiding them like the plague.
@@SmallSpoonBrigade The media used inside was flown over and warped when shipped!!! We fixed as many as we could, and then they moved manufacturing over seas. Then Iomega was robbed blind by the locals. We did it right in Roy, UT!!!
I had a PCMCIA version of one of these. I intended to use it as a backup and file exchange system with my ThinkPad I had at the time, but I ended up never using it. Performance was decent though.
Glad you touched on the click of death.
I only ever used Iomega's 2GB backup drive. Never did use any of the earlier products. We used the 2GB for backups of Unix systems - always with a verify read-after-write pass and mostly multi-volume. My experience was that when you used the discs for the first couple of times you usually got a clean copy (though there were new discs just out of shrink wrap that failed right away) but after that, the reliability got worse and worse - to the point where we eventually got our management to shell out on a streaming tape system from HP - which had its own problems in terms of speed, but was at least more or less reliable over the long term.
Your comment about syquest reminded me that I still have a Syquest 200MB drive (sold in a PowerUser enclosure) with 2 disks. Even still work as of a couple years ago.
I was so excited when I got it for Xmas as a kid many many moons ago.
I had a few of different size IOMEGA drives back in the day when they were popular and seemed to work for me at the time. i had the various ZIP drives and one JAZ drive but never had the CLIK drives.
Yeah newer technology finally made these all obsolete.
Thanks for the video and the memories of using this technology.
Love your videos on these retro storage formats that I read about when I was in my teens but never actually used. I'd love to see you do a video on the IBM Microdrive, which as a user of a relatively early Canon digital camera that used Compact Flash (Powershot G2 in 2002) was always attractive to me because of its greater capactiy than CF at a competitive price.
It was intended for studio use because at the time the tethering connectors weren't fast enough. They were HDD, real HDD, and wouldn't really hold up to being moved much while powered on.
I remember in my old job early 90s they used zip drives. I always say the 90s was truly the computer industry innovation and growth period. I remember seeing computer stores everywhere. It all has died down now.
lol "Clik" omg that's the name they picked after the "click of death" with the 100MB zip drives .... what was their marketing team thinking!!!! 🤦♂🤦♂
My Zip drive failed so routinely there was no way I was going to try their next product.
Nice vid Colin- I didnt know about this obscure storage format haha.. but im sure some enterprising bedroom musician will find a way to do an album release on THIS format now lol
I love the coverage of obscure and failed systems and media formats. I have heard of (but never used) Zip disks, but this product is new to me. I bought my very first digital camera around 2003, and flash memory cards were solidly the standard by then.
What I remember about zip disks, was watching people get their laptop bag and zip disks from their trunk, which froze to -25C overnight, bringing it in, plugging it all in, and turning it all on right away, with dew condensing in it.
(to the tune of Devo's "Whip It")
When a floppy disk won't do, you must ZIP it!
250 megs for you, you must ZIP it!
The disks are gray and blue, you must ZIP it!
419 dollars for 128 Megabytes!
Today you can bud several Terabytes for the same price.
Working for a major telcom from 1970 to 2007, I watched stored data go from paper tape (Baudot code) to magnetic terabyte drives. We even tried "CDs" made of glass that claimed to last 100,000 years. At home, I fell in love with Zip drives which I used in my first digital audio recorder. I hated to see Iomega go away.
I got my first zip-drive the other week. I find the format fascinating. It makes sense for retro computers and their needs. It's a shame that Iomega didn't stay on track with removable storage.
They did, it's just that CD burners made a lot of their benefits less useful. Once USB stick storage devices showed up, the game was pretty much over for Iomega.
I say this as a major Zip drive fan. I still have my original SCSI one bought right on release, as well as an internal ATAPI one and a USB one (I picked the other two up many years after the first). I mostly have them to recover files for any old friends, but data was still good last time I looked on my disks.
I bought a single SyQuest cart for one of the common drives we had on campus before Zip came out - it was larger in size, a bit larger in capacity, but over a hundred bucks compared to 20 for Zip blanks. :P
My roommate had a Jaz 1 GB drive as well as a Zip - that thing was really neat.
As to Zip - when it first came out, if you got the SCSI version you now had basically a slow hard disk to use for fun - the parallel port version was only useful as a backup tool; the use cases for the two models was completely different, and sadly I knew a few folks who got parallel version and screamed in jealousy when they saw how much faster the SCSI version was. :P
The world did not need a zip disk. What it needed was a new universal floppy disk standard with updated specs. By the time Zip disks came out, it was already possible to write 32megabytes to a standard floppy.
A new floppy standard could have easily hit 200MB or more with the right specifications. All they really had to do was design a smaller head standard and decrease the particle size on floppy disks.
Floppy disk technology was fundamentally unchanged since the 70s.
@@tarstarkusz ZIP basically _was_ the next-gen floppy. They were high-capacity enough to be truly useful, small enough to be portable, relatively affordable (if not "cheap"), manufactured by multiple vendors, and thus got a decent amount of traction in the marketplace.
Other than that, there were new floppy drives just about every year. Queue up the entire series of The Computer Chronicles and just watch them in sequence. Keep track of how many times you hear that a manufacturer is or will be releasing a new and improved floppy disk format.... Don't turn it into a drinking game, though. I want you to remain in good health.
It wasn't an easy sell to replace the existing installed base. There was significant skepticism even about the Sony 3.5" floppy disk, and George Morrow made several bold claims that it wouldn't catch on, because all the software was already on 5.25" disks. Then Apple used it for the Macintosh, Commodore used it in the Amiga, and IBM used it in the PS/2, and that was that.
The road was littered with one-ups on this format ... 2.88MB, and several more significant capacity bumps to 20M, 30M, 100M, 120MB, 200M ... Either 1) it was vaporware; 2) it wasn't reliable; 3) nobody had them and thus nothing was on them and thus nobody wanted to invest in a format that wasn't usable anywhere else; and/or 4) the patent holder wanted to charge excessive money per disk, which made it utterly unattractive for a consumable item.
The result was apathy to the point where the 1.44MB format languished well past its useful life, and only took the hint and disappeared when Apple finally called time-of-death, and refused to install them in new computers. At that point, CD was the dominant distribution method for retail software, and flash media was cheap enough to be ubiquitous -- at least in the 8-16MB range, where it was, in just about every way, superior to floppies.
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These days, for us retro nerds, ZIP is a godsend. At least half of my entire (sizable) retro fleet have ZIP drives installed. For systems without (good) USB mass storage support (so basically, everything up to Windows 2000), having a ZIP drive is the easiest way to share >1MB files. With SCSI, it acts like a huge, fast(er) floppy drive. No need to run any software other than generic ASPI disk support drivers, so you have everything you need from a boot floppy. Great way to get all the Windows drivers and essential updates and applications on one disk -- particularly if the CD-ROM isn't CD-R friendly.
@@nickwallette6201 But it wasn't a backwards compatible floppy disk. Plus, it wasn't an open standard like floppy disks were. Initially they were all external because there was no interface available. Most people put a hard disk on one IDE and the CD-ROM on other. The Master/Slave IDE system was fundamentally broken in the early years. There was no quicker way to kill a CD ROM drive than to set it up as a slave on your 0 IDE channel. This was eventually fixed though.
This is why it had to be backward compatible. Since you were only going to make the head smaller and use smaller particle size on the disk and possibly, though not necessarily a faster spin rate , backwards compatibility should not have been much of a problem.
What other floppy disk standards are you talking about? If you mean things like the Bernoulli drive and other drives like that, these were never positioned as a replacement for floppy. Most of those types of things were scsi devices, which almost no PCs had. They were certainly NOT low cost like floppy drives were.
The 2.88 standard was far too little and too expensive. I supported an IBM shop with a ton of Think Pads, PS2s and OS/2 all with 2.88 drives. It's not like they never went anywhere at all, but it was largely just IBM that offered machines as standard with 2.88. This was close to 10 years before the zip drive.
If you can find a USB zip drive, obviously they are a great help today for moving software from a modern machine to an old one, but so is CDRW. 99% of post 1990 retro PCs have an IDE controller. Perhaps they are useful for transferring to very old PCs which have a parallel port but no IDE, like XT and 286 class (most were still MFM or RLL) machines. Not sure if they will work with such old parallel ports though.
I disagree with your apathy comment. The 1.44 drive was still quite useful for the vast majority of people well into the 2000s. Most people were not dealing with huge data files. Even today a lot of what most people use a PC for would work fine even with a 1.44MB floppy drive. HOWEVER, I do agree it should have been upgraded with the caveat that it be backwards compatible. Once something is a standard it is VERY hard to get rid of that standard other than through backwards compatible standards. For example, despite the fact that 2.88 floppies never took off, a lot of 90s PC controllers have 2.88 support built in. I'm using a floppy-less computer right now that has a floppy controller on the motherboard and one of the options for the controller is 2.88MB.
@@tarstarkusz There was eventually the LS240, I think that was a double-size super floppy. 240MB on a floppy was huge back then.
Awesome video! I love your storage format documentary videos, like these. Have you done any on magneto optical drives and WORM? There were 3.5" and 5.25" MO drives, often in SCSI, in a variety of capacities. Would love to see a deep dive into MO technology.
I worked at a TV station in the late 90's that had an electronic still store (the device that put up full screen stills, and over the shoulder boxes) that used one of those WORM drives. You would have to flip it over to read from the other side. It was used for offline storage. The drive wasn't fast enough to read real time from on the air. You would transfer the files over to the enormous 8" internal SCSI drive.
excellent story, thoroughly enjoyed it!
Very interesting Colin. I have a ZIP drive that doesn't work, but I live in hope that one day I may be able to access my (not very important) data.
I disagree with the premise that magnetic media was dead. TO THIS DAY, magnetic media blows away solid state in terms of bytes per dollar. What they failed to do, is update the magnetic media and read/write heads. 2" magnetic disks held many gigabytes in 2000. Due to the nature of sealed drives vs open drives, you could never achieve hard drive levels of data storage, but 1/2 would be reasonable. The main issue is hard drives are sealed in clean rooms and the heads "fly" over the disk extremely close to the disks. While this would not be possible in a portable removable drive, it could have been MUCH, MUCH better than 40MB.
And the competition at the time was a portable hard disk of some kind, either as mentioned in the video build into an audio player or as I bought at the time , or perhaps slightly later, a battery powered hard drive with a media reader built in. It’s floppies that died. Why bother when hard drives are smaller and hold more data.
@@francesconicoletti2547 "Portable" hard disks have their limitations. The heads in a hard disk fly super close to the disk surface. They are extremely susceptible to vibration or shock. Simply placing one down on a desk while it is spinning can kill a hard disk. They aren't exactly power friendly either.
I had these disks. Worked great in my PCMCIA slot with the adapter moving files between my laptop and desktop!
Great video great sound and music great content and information great everything
Why on earth did they name it that when their own Zip drive was notorious for its “Click of Death” problem?
We were using Iomega Zip discs until 2008, because it was the backup and archiving media for our CCTV system.
I had a SCSI zip drive I got from a computer company I worked for. used it with a Pro-Audio Spectrum 16 (Now, there's a throwback for you), then an Adaptec SCSI card. The drives and disks worked fine, but once CD-Rs came into existence, I switched to them and never looked back.
I love these HD solutions. They don't make sense often as you explained, but they're all really sexy and cool-looking - Moreso looking at them now, again, with today's eyes. It was a crazy time.
That clik external setup is soooo 90s.
It remind sme a lot of the external multimedia CDrom that I picked up at HSC surplus electronics.
It had a very similar docking setup. This allowed you to undock the CDrom and use it as a 'portable' CD player. Though a stiff breeze caused it to skip. Had a snazzy neoprene sleeve though
Then you clicked it into the dock and it was a CD rom for hours of Myst gaming!
(loading)
Every time I see a story about Iomega I am reminded of the Syquest/Iomega wars.
It was a rivalry like Mac/PC or Jolt/Mountain Dew. People really lined up on either side and were fanboys.
Though in hindsight my own Syquest apologetics were based on the fact that my school used them.
All the lab workstations had Syquest 270s. Each lab had ONE Iomega on the proctors machine for transfers. And you had to wait for them to virus scan them. Not sure why they thought Syquest were pristine and Iomega were some slutty STD laden media.
Iomega was slower too, but they were cheaper so they won.
the progress of data storage, and the information densities we can reach are insane when you think about it
Sold these and never ever saw the cf reader.... Wonder why we didn't get that in the marketing and demo stuff I omega sent us, probably would have sold more if we'd seen that. IBM micro drive was the wonder kid back then and was for a few years.
Pour one out for Iomega. Long may they be remembered.
I miss this era of technology where everyone everywhere was trying something new and in some way Innovated on something even if it failed it lived on in some way in the future.
Today everyone is just safe, Giving us the same ole same ole stuff now and companies only see how to make money instead of trying something new.
I don't even remember these from back in the day. They probably would have done better had Iomega licensed the tech with a low royalty fee. Much like what the SD Foundation did/does. Writable CDs killed the company though, more so than flash media. Sony used mini-CDs in a lot of their earlier digital cameras. Same size, same transfer rate, MUCH cheaper. Even my Zip drive got tossed the second I discovered that UDF authoring was a thing. When you're selling a 100MB disk for $20 and the guy up the road is selling fifty 650MB CDRW discs for the same price, tough to compete.
I worked at a used computer store here in Tulsa a few years ago, and they had literally CASES upon CASES of these disks as well as a bunch of the MP3 players that all had dead batteries. Amazingly we sold some here and there still. I remember seeing them when they were new and thinking they were neat, but memory cards had already started to take over the market by then. I'll never forget seeing a SmartMedia card for the first time and being truly shocked at how thin it was.
7:20 - The Hip Zip, that's what those damn things were! People were constantly trying to return them even though our listings had in big bold letters that they were all dead and had no warranty of any kind, for parts only or whatever you can use them for.
Ooooh I've never heard of this one! Intriguing
I remember Tape Drives.. What a Pain they were!! Glad modern technology has helped us to easily forget and remain in denial about them!
After Click!/Pocket Zip failed PC World here in the UK started selling drives & disks off cheap & as my GF & me were using Hand Held PC’s at the time we bought PCMCIA drives, partly because they were fine for the sizes of data we needed to swap but also partly because we recognised how over engineered they were for the job & thought it was funny.
I had one of the blue Zip drives for backups back then. One day it got the click of death fault and that was it, dead. There were a few hopefuls who posted instructions for opening it up and fixing the fault - I think it meant moving the read/write head back to the landing zone - but I didn't manage to get mine up and running again. I didn't know there was a class action suit, but here in Australia I don't think it would have counted for much. I held onto the drive and discs for a few years hoping there would be a fix, but somewhere along the way I threw the whole thing out.
lol. That's funny! The ad at the beginning for Nikon CoolPix 900. I still have my Nikon 995. Good little camera.
Awesome video I forgot about a lot of that stuff
I had a Clik drive for school and loved it. But it was a pain that there wasn't much to use it with. The PCMCIA card was neat tech at the time.
I remember using the ZIP disks when I was in college. We had rather good internet at the location and I used these disks to work around the slow speed of my then dial-up connection at home. They were perfect for that task. I still have a few worming disks laying around but no working reader to put them in 😄
I was an early adopter of motion graphics on Macs for music videos back in the mid 90s. The Jaz and Zip were a game changer bc the SD animation files were generally large.
Some context needs to be made, I was just coming into my teens just as the media revolution was beginning to happen. I remember pricing out a custom family PC, and we couldn't get over the price of the ZIP disks (the desktop-based internal reader wasn't too bad, price-wise). A single-speed disk burner was a significant outlay upfront, but the disks were still "cheap" in terms of value back then. It also wasn't a big secret already that the zip disks had a nasty habit of dying spontaneously without warning, so it was just a little stunning that they would come out with what I called "the mini-zip disks" that they were purposely trying to advocate like these things could handle a hard life under a marathon runner's belt. Iomega was HUGE, there was no reason for them to NOT pivot to digital media, and that stubbornness ultimately caused their demise. You didn't need to own a cassette player or a discman for long before realizing the value of flash media, and the parabolic climb of it (irrespective of price), was apparent to myself even as a young twelve year old.
I still have a Zip100 drive and bunch of disks somewhere around here. Wonder if they still work.
I almost bought an SLR camera with Click! disk storage, but ended up going with a traditional 35mm SLR (itself soon supplanted by SSM storage). Technology development is a freight train.
Oh this takes me back, I was working at the student newspaper with a Mavica back around 2002 that had a 3.5 floppy drive in it. If I remember correctly you could get about 10 photos on one of those disks. The good old days ha ha.