And I'm all out of... Wait, no, I've got more Zip disks!

(typing, trumpet-led jazz music)

Greetings and welcome to another episode of LGR Oddware,

where we're taking a look at hardware and software that is odd, forgotten,

and obsolete.

And is definitely the Zip drive. (chuckles)

This I've been wanting to talk about for a long time.

And, yeah, as far as I'm concerned,

it is Oddware.

It's a little bit odd in the way it works.

It's definitely forgotten by a lot of folks.

And obsolete? Absolutely.

I mean, this is a parallel port drive,

only 100 megs.

But of course, there were a whole lot of different types of these.

We're gonna look at several of them.

And go over the history of it a little bit

and setting it up and trying it out with some things,

seeing what it can do.

Let's do it!

- [LGR] This is the Iomega Zip 100.

A parallel port version, an external drive.

Yeah, this is the very first model that they introduced

in very late 1994

at Comdex in November.

From the Iomega Corporation based in Roy, Utah.

This was a 3½-inch floppy disk alternative of sorts,

sometimes called a "super floppy."

It had 100 MB, but they went all the way up to 750 MB per disk,

or cartridge, in 2002,

which was the highest capacity model of these things.

They originally cost around 200 bucks for the base drive bundle,

like this parallel port one here.

And a bit more for things like the SCSI versions,

and there were internal ones as well

that used an IDE interface, among other things.

Either way, a couple hundred bucks or so.

And then it was $20 per disk originally.

And that may sound like a lot, but remember,

this was equivalent to what were 70 high-density 3½-inch floppy disks,

so it really was kind of a bargain.

And yeah, I've been wanting to talk about these things for years now.

I've got a lot of requests to. I run across them in thrift stores

on LGR Thrifts and such,

and people are always asking, "Oh, why don't you cover a Zip drive?"

And I'm like, "Okay, here we are."

I've also gotten some requests being like,

"Don't forget the Jazz and the Rev drives and things like that."

Well those are different, actually.

They're removable hard disk cartridges.

And there's also Iomega ZipCD,

which had nothing to do with the Zip technology here.

It was just a standard CD writer.

So yeah, today we're really just gonna be talking about

these original Zip drives, the Zip 100s.

So Iomega had actually been around since 1980,

selling all sorts of different storage things

and at the point that they introduced Zip drive,

their most current things were the Bernoulli and the Ditto drives.

The Bernoulli one I've covered in the past

and the Ditto was just a tape drive.

These were nothing particularly exciting or selling very well.

In fact, the company sales were stagnant

and they needed something

to get the company growing.

But the Zip, holy crap, that ended up being

a massive hit almost immediately.

The timing was right, the price was right,

they were relatively cheap,

and it ended up being their biggest hit.

In fact, the company's equity increased by 2,000 percent

the year after the Zip was introduced.

And it wasn't without it's competition

and other people trying similar ideas

within those years or so, in that mid-'90s area.

Things like the LS-120, the SuperDisk,

the UHD-144

and the Sony HiFD.

These are all prime Oddware targets in the future, of course.

But yeah, anyway, Zip, right?

Zip was the mainstream thing.

It was so popular, BIOS manufacturers like AMI and Phoenix

included support for these right from the get-go.

You could boot your computer from a Zip disk.

Don't even mess with floppy disks at all if you don't want to.

And it was also used in devices like music samplers,

aircraft navigation systems,

and even Iomega got into their own game, so to speak.

They introduced something called the FotoShow,

which hooked up to TVs and let you display pictures through Zip disks.

I have one of those, and I'm gonna cover that in a separate video.

Yeah, while these things were massively popular,

and people bought them up like crazy,

the quality control was a mixed bag.

I mean, sure they were a little cheaper

than some of the competition and whatnot,

But it got them into some trouble

because later models especially

were prone to something called the "Click of Death,"

where the read-write heads inside would misalign,

sometimes ripping the heads off entirely,

losing data, destroying the drive, and it was a problem.

So much so that there was a lawsuit, a class-action lawsuit,

Rinaldi v. Iomega.

They alleged that the warranty was vague

and Iomega was sort of covering this thing up

and there were a bunch of other things in there.

And eventually, it was settled.

Iomega had to send out product rebates

to buyers of Zip drives

for a future product from Iomega.

So it's just kinda like, "Here, we know our product sucks."

"Buy some more with this rebate."

It's kind of a stupid settlement if you ask me, but anyway. (laughs)

It's also pretty amusing that Iomega actually made a Clik! drive

at the same time as the "Click of Death" debacle

and the class-action lawsuit.

They renamed it the Pocket Zip later on.

It just... yeah, Clik! drive.

That's a, that's a pretty classic misstep

just by accident.

This definitely put a dent in Iomega's reputation,

but it didn't actually kill them.

What did that

were a combination of things.

Mostly just technology changing and other stuff getting cheaper,

like CD-Rs and CD-RWs.

Those got really cheap and people weren't using Zip disk as much.

And, you know, they had much higher capacity.

By the time they came out with their 750 meg Zip drive,

then you had USB sticks and flash memory taking off like crazy.

And then that stuff got dirt cheap, and then nobody bought Zip drives any more.

Iomega stuck around, though.

In fact, they're still around, they're just called LenovoEMC, Limited.

But yeah, they made stuff for a long time,

they're still going, so it's kind of impressive, really.

And just as a sort of side note, since I know somebody's gonna ask:

No, Zip disks are not related to the .zip file compression format.

That was developed by Phil Katz

five years before Zip drives came out.

While naturally you can put .zip files on Zip disks,

that's not where the name came from.

It's just mean to imply "zippy."

Alright, so let's go ahead and take a look

at the Zip 100.

This is going to be the parallel port version.

There's also the SCSI one, but you can see that they're

pretty much identical, it's just the interface that is different.

I've always quite enjoyed that BMW key just

casually placed there in front of the Zip drive.

I'm sure that's not meant to infer

anything at all about the kind of customer they were hoping to attract.

BMWs and Zip drives, they go hand-in-hand.

"Zip disks can hold all your stuff. Work stuff,"

"home stuff, other stuff,"

even games.

Yeah, "Store and run all of your games."

Yeah, definitely gonna have to put that to the test.

Do note this as well. This says, "up to 20MB per minute transfer rate."

That would be very generous.

"Welcome to Zip drive. Inside is all the stuff you need

to get started."

So let's get started!

First up here, we have

the driver disk, the installation here for DOS, Windows 3.1 and Windows 95.

This is a June 1997 release.

I do find it a bit amusing that a floppy disk sort of replacement is

still relying on floppy disks to install itself, but, you know.

The Zip accessories, yes!

All sorts of things that Iomega put out there to

augment the Zip disk ecosystem.

"What are you gonna do with your new Zip drive?"

You could do whatever you want, I guess.

Like with all these stickers that say

all the things that you can do.

"I am Old Stuff." Yeah.

I would actually use that sticker, 'cause it's just true.

Got the installation guide here which is in one of these irritating

fold-out designs. I hate when instructions do this.

Just give me a stapled together little booklet.

There's no reason for this.

Same with the user's guide. It opens up and...

Yeah, there you go.

But it really is just super simple to use these things.

There's not a whole lot going on. You plug them in and it pretty much just works.

Well, it has a printer passthrough, so that's cool.

You can plug in your printer. This is taking up the parallel port in this version.

And here we go!

This is the contents right there,

and look how nice and tidy this is.

I found this at Goodwill like this, actually, so

I was pretty impressed. It looks brand new.

I mean...

Just look at that.

Has this ever been used?

I mean seriously. (chuckles)

The parallel cable is still sealed in its little package, so...

Let's go ahead and take a look at the media itself,

which is a Zip 100 disk, in this case.

And, yeah, check it out.

You can see what they were going for as far as the

"super floppy" floppy disk replacement kind of thing.

But there are some obvious differences.

A Zip disk is gonna be thicker, of course.

And where this opens up and reveals the magnetic media inside,

this one does not on the back.

The Zip disk actually opens up and you can see, sort of,

the media inside of that.

So it opens from the top.

The little read-write mechanism just goes in there like that.

You also see this little retro reflective bit?

This is going to tell the drive itself

what kind of disk has been inserted in there.

This has actually got Zip Tools on there already.

"Free Software! $100 value."

Of course, it was also pretty much just a free disk.

People just overwrote these, at least from what I remember.

But, yeah, there wasn't actually a lot of software

sold on Zip disks.

I think it was pretty much just limited to very niche applications

and certain things from Iomega, certain things for the music sequencers.

And here is

the drive itself.

What a nice little thing.

I like this window on the top there

with the little graphics showing you how things work.

The little rubber feets.

Which meant it could stand up like this.

I mean, it's just a cool piece of bluish-purple '90s tech.

It's, you know, not an unattractive thing.

This was definitely the most common one, as far as form factor.

External was seemingly more popular than internal,

at least in my experience, but there were a lot of internals as well.

So, yeah, the disk just goes in here

And there it is! And it's not gonna open

because this power, this eject button won't work

unless this thing is powered on.

So that's gonna be stuck in there until I plug it into the wall.