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It's always funny to me to read a history of something I lived through written by someone who didn't. I don't think anyone who was in the industry at the time would say the Zip drive dominated the 1990s.

To set the scene, most people in the 90s didn't own a computer at all and the majority of people who did own a computer never owned a zip drive. While Zip was the most successful of the Superfloppies, it was never ubiquitous. By the sales numbers, 10-15% of computer owners bought zip drives. Compare to a floppy or CDROM which is close to 100%.

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 vanished like everything in life that people had to suffer because there was no other choice: as soon as something better appeared, everybody ditched the hateful thing.

Then newer generations who didn't actually have to use the shit to do actual work revive it and called it vintage. Not for me: ZIP and JAZ drives are dead and they should stay dead. Good riddance.

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.

I had a tower PC around 2000 with a zip drive. I had 1 zip disk, which I seem to recall having cost $35 for 100mb of storage. I didn't know anyone else with a zip drive, nor were there other computers on campus with a zip drive. It was slow as fuck and seemed to get stuck in the drive randomly.

Because click click click click click click dead drive

I still have a dozen or Zip disks from high school and university. Perhaps even a drive around, somewhere, just in case I want to look at some really old term papers! I don't miss them; the notorious click of death got me one too many times.

Because they sucked. They hit a very brief moment of being bigger than floppies and not as expensive as another hard disk, but they broke all the time, lost data, were expensive, and CD burning came along and got cheap real fast.

I always had wanted a zip drive. Never could afford it. Went straight to cdrw.

I was growing up in the 90s. Zip drives definitely did not dominate; they were a failure. My dad actually did use zip drive personally at home so I'm familiar with them, but I never saw them in school, and they were not used commonly by most people. Most people never seem to have ever heard of them.

When I grew up 3.5inch floppy disks were the standard from the late 80s into the 90s. In the mid 90s files were getting bigger so yes there was a need for more storage than 1.44mb on an 3.5inch floppy disk for some people. But most Word documents would still fit on a floppy disk, and of course email was a thing (albeit the internet was slow and transfers could take ages). You could also Zip a file (not Zip Drive but the Zip file format) and split it into 1.44mb chunks to use multiple floppies.

So I remember when Iomega's Zip Drives came out. They did look good but the problem was they were just too expensive - both the disks and the readers - any they just weren't in the vast majority of computers so weren't useful, so they never took off. Whats the point of putting a file on a Zip Disk if the computer at the other end doesn't have a drive to take it? I'm sure some business switched to them but they never really became truly mainstream.

Instead CD was definitely the dominant format. Almost all new computers in the 90s (certainly mid to late 90s anyway) had a built in CD drive. And then CD-R (CD write once) drives came along. You either made do with floppys & the internet, or you had a CD-R drive if you wanted to transfer big files. CD could be slow to write but was always quick to read; and Zip Drives were just always slow. And of course music was the big thing for young people - so you'd rip your favourite songs and burn them onto a CD and could play it anywhere - your walkman, your Hifi, your mates car (if they were lucky enough to have a CD player). So CD-R drives just became essential, and especially anyone with any tech interest. If you were into games you might also rip your favourite games and burn those onto a CD too. Video just wasn't really a thing until 1998 when DivX came along and that took a little while to take off, but again CD was the star.

I remember actually my 6th Form College in the early 2000s DID buy computers with in-built Zip Drives, but by then it was too late - the internet was already fast enough & USB sticks had appeared. Even my dad wasn't using them any-more and he'd been an early adopter.

Cd burners dropping massively in price is what did it.

100mb iomega vs 700mb cd? No contest.

At the turn of the century a mac cd burner cost $300 and was scsi (i know, i bought my dad one). Five years later you could score one for $40. Ten years later and it did dvds too. Five years after that it did both and read bluray

Never actually had one of these or knew anyone who did. I did do work experience recording business applications onto tape to send in the post though.

For me zip was mainly two things:

• I put all my things on it that I wanted to use on a shared computer. At the time that included downloads from the internet which I didn’t have access to directly from my own computer.
• Hot fix for running out of hard disk. Zip was not far off from the sizes hard disks were in the early-mid 90ies. 100 MB of extra room was big and attaching another hard disk wasn’t necessarily an option.

I’m not sure about them “dominating” though. Virtually none of my friends had one.

I was an early adopter of a cd burner but I still found Zip drives to be way better for casual storage. CDrs were great for audio cds or video cds, but cd-rws were slow and painful. Zips were great for quick storage where you didn’t have to think about filling up a cd permanently.

Why were they called zip drives to begin with? Was it related to the compression format, or just a marketing thing?

I remember some format differences that made it difficult too. I think when the higher capacity versions hit, they weren't backwards compatible and cd burning was becoming a thing. When people saw virtually any cd worked in any drive, it was an instant buy.