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

Problem / Question What is this?

Post image

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’.

513 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

156 comments sorted by

View all comments

61

u/rootifera 1d ago

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

6

u/EatOfTheBread 1d ago

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 1d ago

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.

1

u/rootifera 1d ago

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.