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This is absolutely my experience. I was lucky enough to have a home desktop and needed to transport stuff to my university, floppy drives were the main method but so painful. Zip drives were better, but still sucked and frequently failed.

I clearly remember swapping the zip drive for a cdrw one. Far more reliable and 6x the space.

Totally accurate. I had a zip drive, and barely used it. It was quickly surpassed by several other storage mediums that were bigger and cheaper.

Yep. I worked in the tech industry during that time and was around a LOT of computers in different business settings. I can count on one hand the number of zip drives I encountered.

Exactly. for me they were an expensive curiosity. 100 or even 20 bucks back then wasn’t exactly chump change. If you did have a computer, it was much cheaper to just use a burner or even a pile of floppies which were dirt cheap and reliable. I only really saw them somewhat frequently at university. When i could afford them, they felt well-made but performance was terrible and the disks and devices failed after only a few months… even the stupid external burner. By then the competition was eating their lunch anyway.

In college I knew exactly one person with a zip drive.

These were my exact thoughts. I knew one guy with a zip drive.

Writeable CDs were great when you had a lot of data to archive (digital camera photos etc) but they had drawbacks too. Burnt CDs were generally not readable on other computers until they were 'finalised' and so they were pretty useless for things like taking files to-and-from school where you need to constantly edit and delete and change.

Fortunately, Word documents were pretty small, and so I personally managed to survive with floppy disks until I finally could get a USB flash drive. For CDs I only ever really burnt fully finalised CD-Rs which I never intended to 're' write - because the rewritable aspect was too much hassle and incompatibility.

And so my feeling is very much that Zip and CD aren't technologies I would have considered equivalent.

Zip didn't catch on in the mainstream market but as basically a bigger floppy it did catch on in others and one was music production. Lots of equipment from that period had zip drives, because music files were that perfect combination of needing to edit and write and move around between different machines, while also being much bigger than text documents and too big for floppy.

If flash drives hadn't started to appear on the scene I think eventually one of the 'super floppies' (or some other equivalent rewriteable technology) would have had to emerge, because CDs really couldn't do the same job as a floppy.

I needed a zip disk for graphic design unit I took at Uni. All I remember was it being slow and unreliable.

Game Boy Color: JP: October 21, 1998
WonderSwan: JP: March 4, 1999
Game Boy Advance: JP: March 21, 2001
Modern video games historians: what ever happened to the WonderSwan, guess we'll never know

Its funny to me to see someone who sees such a different perspective of the 90's. My family was one of the poorest of the area. My dad was a janitor. We had one of the many generic clone pcs back in the late 80's. Had to park the hard drive and everything. My friend from a wealthier family was never without one just for him. It was not a family computer. I built my first sometime around 98. We both used zip or zip like devices. zip was a bit to expensive but many less techy folk used them. I went gaga over a competitor that had huge disks relative to them but I can't for the life of me remember the name. Certainly students in the lab I worked in were still using them well into the early aughts. Its really flash drives that killed them. I should look through my old box of stuff and I kinda wonder if I may have one sitting in there. Burning a disc was just not as convenient as saving a file.

Yeah, I had a teacher who had one and I thought it'd be cool to not need as many floppies. But that's the only time I was ever near one, and I don't think I ever held one in my hands. Then I forgot because better stuff came along 😛

The only reason I had zip drives was because I took a CAD class at the local community college which required them for saving models on the lab machines. I think we were one of the last classes to use the zip drives before flash storage started becoming ubiquitous.

While Zip was the most successful of the Superfloppies, it was never ubiquitous.

...

The reason it vanished quickly was simple: Zip was never that good and CDRW was much better. As soon as the prices dropped for CDRW, Zip was a goner.

They all made the same mistake: trying to extract monopoly rents instead of becoming an open standard. Same reason why most of Sony's bullshit over the years (betamax, minidisc, memory stick, etc.) failed, regardless of whether it was technologically "good" or not.

There could have been room in the market for a standardized superfloppy, but the companies making them relegated themselves to be niche by their greed well before CDRW finished them off.

(I owned a zip drive as a teenage computer nerd, BTW. Pretty sure I still have it in a box somewhere.)