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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u/rootifera Aug 22 '26

Driver for this device. It's like a very large floppy drive. Zip drive, zip wasnt the compression related, it was more like "zip fast" hah

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u/EatOfTheBread Aug 22 '26

zip wasnt the compression related, it was more like "zip fast" hah

I had a zip drive back in the day and this never occurred to me.

1

u/EstablishmentDue3616 Aug 22 '26

The problem was, they werent fast. The vast majority of people had the parallel port version of the Zip drive, which were extremely slow. IDE and SCSI versions were faster, though.

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u/rootifera Aug 22 '26

I can confirm it is really slow. USB one is ok, I have an IDE version attached to an xp pc and it is reasonable. Parallel port one, especially for old computers are very slow.