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Comment by tragomaskhalos | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting to speculate what would have happened if the parallel innovations of CD and internet had not sidelined the floppy, since software was already outgrowing them : the last version of Visual C++ that I installed from floppies came on IIRC several dozen disks, requiring the thing to be carried in a couple of sturdy carrier bags - clearly not a sustainable situation.

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The Zip drive by Iomega enjoyed a few years of popularity around 1995-1998:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_drive

They were commonly used in graphic design, at least. (Designers needed to send files to print all the time, and the Zip drive was the standard until CD-R became cheap and fast enough.)

There were Zip, there were Jaz, there were LS120, there were various MO formats.

Thinking about it i wonder if what killed it was not just the CD-R, but also that it went from primary storage (early PC etc) to transitory storage (sneakernet etc) as HDDs took over.

I actually bought a floppy drive from Best Buy around 2002 as a replacement. I had some old files I needed from floppy, and Best Buy was the only place open. Cost me $35 at the time. When I got home, I was surprised to find the floppy drive inside had a 40 pin connector instead of the standard 34 pin (MFM) connector. The drive seemed a little different, and I hesitantly connected it to my desktop to find that it was recognized as an LS-120 drive.

By 2002 LS-120 was already past its peak and even Zip drives were pretty much old news. I think I got my first Thumb drive a year later, with about 512 MB of storage.

I still have the LS-120 drive in my primary desktop, and it was a nice drive. It was quieter than other floppy drives, and had a motorized load and eject function.

What killed Zip and Jaz was Iomega's ineptitude. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_of_death

"Only one out of every 200 users experiences sudden, catastrophic data loss!" is not the kind of thing you want to hear from your storage vendor.

And for the last mile: Moving the downloaded goods from Fast Internet Place (as in the computer class of the school) to Slow Internet Place (home with V.34 only connection). And to send them via snail mail between swapper friends.

I used to use Zip disks to sneakernet files to and from computers on an isolated network. This was when USB flash drives were ~8-16MB and we were not guaranteed access to part of the machine were a USB slot was. I also remember using Sysinternals Sync before ejecting the disks. Too many times did I get back to my desk and have corrupt (incompletely written) files otherwise.

As far as I am concerned it wasn't CD and internet but USB storage getting really cheap in 2001 ~ 2002: it fulfilled all the same use cases as the floppy, didn't require special hardware, was more reliable and had more storage capacity.

Zip drives would have gained popularity, probably, to be later supplanted/replaced by read-only USB sticks/memory cards.

I remember IIRC AutoCAD 12 on too many floppies... was swapping disks for days in my H.S. cad lab... Though ZIP wasn't so bad... if you removed a few bits, NT4's installer fit on a zip disk.

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