ZIP was fairly successful until writable CDs came along. The biggest problem was the click of death. I remember collecting multiple drives in the late 1990’s trying to find one that didn’t have that issue.

I guess they could have done a more open standard, but I’m not sure it would have helped them. I recall Superdisk was a slightly more open standard around the same time (maybe a little later) and it went no where.

I loved my ZIP drive. At home, we had a flaky 56k6 connection. Since my dad worked at the university where he had a 100MBit connection, I would sometimes tag along with him, bring a stack of ZIP disks, and download a Linux distribution and a bunch of other new stuff.

Put this on a Zip disk, send it to your lawyer

File me under "Funky" - Beastie Boys

Still got a stack of Zip disks somewhere, full of Uni coursework and old design projects. The drive, in translucent plastic (to match the iMac), died long ago.

Back in the day, 100mb was a breathtakingly large amount of storage - more than 80 floppy disks!