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slashink

22 years ago

https://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/03/business/investing-it-the...

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Just going to say that I loved my Zip drive!

True! Before USB drives they were great at the job.

And my unit wasn't affected by the click of death apparently.

22 year ago, in 1996, 5 years before the dot-com bubble burst

Minidisc, anyone?

I still do not really understand why this wasnt more successful (at least by the time CDs existed/were used)

Why MiniDisc wasn't more successful, or why Iomega wasn't more successful?

For Iomega, it was because of terrible quality control, leading to fiascos like the Zip drive "click of death" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_of_death#Iomega_Zip_driv...). A storage vendor whose products develop a reputation for frequent, catastrophic data loss isn't going to stick around long.

For MiniDisc, it was because MD didn't offer a clear leap up from what you could get from compact discs, and because Sony couldn't help but be Sony and go off and develop their own system while everyone else in the industry was using a different one (DCC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Compact_Cassette).

For the majority of people this is obviously true, but my MD was so much better than my Discman. I could record MDs and it was rock stable, while the Discman (even the later models with buffer) would jump all the time. Would have loved to own DAT, but was too expensive.

For zip drives, also because it became cheaper and faster to burn a CD, then came usb keys.

Still have my minidisc somewhere, loved it. Though I think my latest was from Sharp and I could record, not from Sony.

that must suck..to have the misfortune of buying that stock instead of AOL, Cisco, Oracle, Intel, Dell, Microsoft..anything else would have been better. It goes to show how you can lose money even i n a boom if have bad luck, but also a good reason to diversify. .

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