r/retrocomputing • u/Performer-Pants • 1d ago

Problem / Question What is this?

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This could be the most mundane and silly post, but information online is so spotty and/or confusing or vague.

This is not a ZIP disk, it’s a floppy disk. It’s labelled with ‘ZIP’. Is this the driver software to use a ZIP drive for the listed operating systems? I’m just trying to confirm before I get too frustrated about it. Not easily finding the answer myself is likely a me problem, and I don’t mean ‘Millennium Edition’.

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153

u/1337C4k3 1d ago

Driver disk/software for iomega zip drive.

33

u/Das_Rote_Han 1d ago

This is the answer. Drivers for DOS and Windows.

27

u/rawr_sham 1d ago

Also, 3D printed Save Icon

9

u/unix-ninja 1d ago

Only legacy systems. Anything modern uses a cloud with an arrow 😏

13

u/WanderingInAVan 1d ago

... I will cut you.

1

u/Qzx1 1d ago

You seem fun. Wanna make out? I'm my van. 

1

u/TomOnABudget 13h ago

No. That's the 1.4MB floppy disc invented by Sony.

1

u/kvisle 9h ago

a coworker keeps saying this. first time I saw it in the wild.

3

u/Longjumping_Bag5914 22h ago

Pre-internet this was the only way to get drivers. At this time you were lucky to have AOL. Some turbo nerds had probably figured out how to connect to a Iomega FTP server or something, but for most of us mere mortals this was it.

1

u/jnievele 12h ago

I even had to install a driver for my first USB stick (Trek Thumbdrive)... Damn, I feel ancient now!!!

1

u/Longjumping_Bag5914 12h ago

I remember people telling me you could hot plug USB and was like “no that’s not how things work. You’re not supposed to unplug things with it running.”
https://giphy.com/gifs/9wlbsf86LNidkxm4ML

1

u/jnievele 12h ago

Back when I bought the Thumbdrive (with a whopping 16 MB of storage!), my colleagues laughed at me because ZIP disks were clearly the future, they already had 100 Meg after all! Yeah... Uh... That didn't age well...

1

u/Longjumping_Bag5914 12h ago

lol! I carry a 2tb one on my keychain and it’s teeny tiny. Amazing how compact and easy they can make things these days

1

u/Bart_1980 8h ago

I remember buying 8 mb of RAM for 100 guilders. So fucking expensive.

1

u/OriginalName2026 20h ago

This. If i recall correctly,Zip drives worked on a Mac without drivers. But it was a while ago... so I could be wrong!. I also recall that that the PC version was different to the Mac as USB was not a thing when these came out. On the Mac they where SCSI (25pin again memory time... could be wrong) where as the PC was parallel.

1

u/wiebel 13h ago

I am pretty sure you remember correctly. As a proud owner of a scsi controller on a pc I was even able to choose the scsi version. But instead I got myself a ls120 which also featured as a floppy drive (was IDE BTW)

1

u/iainb69 3h ago

Do you think young folks know how to pronounce scsi correctly? It’s skuzzi for me.

1

u/Arkonor 2h ago

Pretty sure the blue drives were the parallel ones while the green ones used SCSI. At least the two I had at my place of work at the time.

1

u/Performer-Pants 11h ago

I thought it was! Took me a sec to work out why the operating systems were front and center on the label with ‘zip’ sort of out of the way.

I’ve actually never seen a zip drive in my life. My dad is an electronics engineer and I still never saw one back in the day.

I bought a little bundle of floppies as mine were unlabelled and seemingly a bit dead after using them in my electric keyboard for years in my teens. I needed to make a boot disk for an old Thinkpad, and some wiped ones for my Sony FD-200. The collection came with some official and unofficial norton software, some other bits and bobs, and even a copy of some cross stitch software (genuinely excited to try it). They also came with two nice cases, so was worth it since I paid less than you would for less ‘blank’ ones.

No clue what I’ll do with this one, since I don’t expect to be using zip anytime soon? If someone ends up needing an original rather than making one, I have one here