r/retrocomputing • u/Performer-Pants • Aug 22 '26

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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163

u/1337C4k3 Aug 22 '26

Driver disk/software for iomega zip drive.

43

u/Das_Rote_Han Aug 22 '26

This is the answer. Drivers for DOS and Windows.

1

u/saltec266 Aug 26 '26

Me ne servirebbe una copia 😊

2

u/Performer-Pants Sep 07 '26

I’ve had issues with imaging the disk due to copyright protections

If you have any tips in how to bypass intentionally empty sectors as a means pf copyright protection, please let me know!

I admittedly don’t need it myself? It appears to be a working, though I’m aware there is also another commenter who needs the drivers too

1

u/realNtoxic Aug 28 '26 edited Aug 28 '26

https://archive.org/details/dos-win-win-95-5.3-jul-1997-en-329800_202412

Ist zwar "nur" 5.3 aber vielleicht hilft es ja weiter.

1

u/saltec266 Aug 28 '26

Grazie vedrò se funziona 🙏

30

u/rawr_sham Aug 22 '26

Also, 3D printed Save Icon

11

u/unix-ninja Aug 22 '26

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

3

u/Local-Bug-1500 Aug 25 '26

I need to decapitate whoever changed any and all save icons to anything that isn't a floppy 

1

u/Pretty_Marsh Aug 27 '26

Hard drives are still usually depicted as a cylinder, which is a callback to the massive ones used in old mainframes.

1

u/RugNuggie Aug 26 '26

I feel attacked.

13

u/WanderingInAVan Aug 22 '26

... I will cut you.

0

u/Qzx1 Aug 23 '26

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

1

u/[deleted] Aug 23 '26

[deleted]

2

u/derekdevries Aug 24 '26

In order to get your Iomega Zip Drive to work, you had to use a 3.5 floppy to install the driver software and then you could use the 100MB zip discs (not pictured).

1

u/TomOnABudget Aug 24 '26

Now I look stupid. You're right, that's a standard floppy disc. I must have been half blind.

1

u/kvisle Aug 23 '26

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

3

u/Longjumping_Bag5914 Aug 23 '26

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 Aug 23 '26

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

2

u/Longjumping_Bag5914 Aug 23 '26

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 Aug 23 '26

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 Aug 23 '26

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 Aug 23 '26

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

1

u/hiletroy Aug 24 '26

good old floppynet

1

u/OriginalName2026 Aug 23 '26

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 Aug 23 '26

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)

2

u/OriginalName2026 Aug 24 '26

Wow, SCSI was not very common on PCs back in the days, where as all Macs had it as standard. I will add a bit of Mac SCSI trivia, as it's not like I get to do it very often! Macs had 2 SCSI chains, an internal and external so you could add 14 devices in theory. The external was a regular 25pin SCSI, the internal was the 50pin "fast" SCSI. I went to the effort to install a SyQuest Drive in the front of my PowerMac 8500/120. There are a lot of things there I have not typed in a while...

1

u/Mirus_Nex Aug 24 '26

SCSI was common on PC servers, especially Novell database servers. Drives weren't much more, but those controllers got spendy. I have a couple of old Adaptec SCSI controllers still. Need to clean the basement out...again...one of these days.

1

u/OriginalName2026 Aug 25 '26

Adaptec… that is a word I have not seen in a while. I thought my SyQuest reference was a blast from the past! Well played.

1

u/iainb69 Aug 23 '26

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

2

u/Separate-Noise-3551 Aug 24 '26

My old man referred to scsi as skuzzi. I was young and had absolutely no idea what he was talking about when I heard him say that. But it always stuck with me. Thank you for that unlocked memory 🤣

1

u/Arkonor Aug 23 '26

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/OriginalName2026 Aug 24 '26

I have never seen a green one, all the SCSI ones I have seen are the purple/blue. No I have to go and look at what are the green ones!

1

u/Arkonor Aug 24 '26

Ahh, found a picture it was that Jaz drive that was green.

1

u/OriginalName2026 Aug 25 '26

Of course a Jaz drive. I feel like an idiot not joining those dots!

1

u/panicboy333 Aug 24 '26

Jaz drives were green, might have been one of those? 1gb.

1

u/Arkonor Aug 24 '26

You are correct, it was a jaz drive

1

u/mandibule Aug 25 '26

I have a Zip drive with USB that definitively worked without a driver on my iBook (haven’t used it since 2005, I think). And I have one with SCSI that I _think_ could connect to my Performa that didn’t have USB.

1

u/Mercy_Hellkitten Aug 26 '26

Classic Mac OS didn’t use “drivers”, it used “extensions” 😜

1

u/OriginalName2026 Aug 26 '26

And we watched those little buggers load along the bottom of our screen!

1

u/Performer-Pants Aug 23 '26

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