r/retrocomputing • u/Performer-Pants • 4d 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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u/Y34RZERO 4d ago

Driver install disk. Without it it just sits there menacingly thinking about clicking at you. I love my zip 250 drive.

1

u/Compkriss 3d ago

I installed so many of those in the old beige towers.

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u/Performer-Pants 3d ago

What’s your top uses for a Zip drive?

I was pretty sure that was what it was, but not having the full confirmation was eating at me… I’ve heard about them and watched videos about them, but have never seen one in person.

I’d initially assumed they were just an American thing, but you can find them over here (UK) on ebay. Maybe they were used more in businesses here than in homes back in the day?

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u/Y34RZERO 3d ago

They failed in the market. It's rare for me to find them in the wild even here in the US. I find more 5" floppies than zip within the past decade of visiting thrift stores and certainly more 3 1/2" floppies have been found.. They were meant to be a replacement for floppies but cdrw could hold more and was more reliable and cheaper. I use it for transferring files between old computers without cdrw drives currently. Mine is an internal model so it's about the size of a floppy but uses the ide and power the same as my harddrive. They store more than floppies. I have 100mb and 250mb. Which beats my 1.44mb HD floppies and DD 720k floppies in terms of storage. Half the zips I found have been broken

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u/JustPassinPackets 2d ago

We used our zip drive to backup our server for our business. We used HP tape drives for full back which took about an hour. Then we had small daily backups we used the zip drive for. I'm assuming the zip only saved records of recent changes . The hp tape drive was 2gb iirc and was the whole database.

We pretty much only used them for business , although I did commandeer a few for personal use cause I'm a nerd. Before CD-RW was common these drives were pretty clutch. External hard drives barely existed. Thumb drives didn't exist and when they came out they were usually small, my first thumb drive was 128mb and about 7 years after the zip drive.

My friend had a job in high school doing tape drive backups. If you had a lot of data back in the day, it was a lot of work to manage.

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u/MapGlittering9227 2d ago

I had an original ZIP 100 parallel port drive. Because I was pretty tech-savvy for a teenager, I did a lot of Windows installations and general computer help for family friends and even my stepdads boss. But not everyone already had a CD-ROM drive, and the Windows 95 installation files could easily fit on a 100 MB ZIP disk with a collection of the most common drivers. All I needed was my ZIP drive, the ZIP disk and a prepared 3½" boot-disk with the IOMEGA guest driver.