this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2026
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Zip drives weren't that common in the 90's. Your typical Windows 95 or 98 PC had a 1.44MB 3.5 inch floppy drive, a CD-ROM drive or two, maybe a 5 1/4" floppy drive. A Zip drive was pretty much always a separate purchase, you could never count on a random PC somewhere having one, and most people didn't have much of a use for one.
A standard floppy would hold game saves, text documents, the occasional jpg or whatever just fine. Software was distributed on CD-ROM, the whole multimedia revolution thing. People started getting used to the My Documents folder and storing files on the machine's local hard drive, so the Zip was limited to people who needed to personally archive large files. CD-R and CD-RW started getting popular, they could hold even more files, plus you could make audio discs, so more normies wanted them.
Didn't really help that Iomega kept coming out with competitors to Zip, like their Jaz hard drive cartridge system, Ditto tapes and Clik disks.