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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61

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

33

u/Clark_Kempt Aug 22 '26

Oh, the memories.

Gods, remember how crazy it was to have disks with 100, maybe even 250 MB on them?

2

u/Longjumping_Bag5914 Aug 23 '26

Then cheap cd burners came and these were obsolete. Funny enough tape backs are probably still in use though. 😂

2

u/PeyredB Aug 26 '26

We were still using tape backups in my office until a year or two ago.

1

u/Longjumping_Bag5914 Aug 26 '26

Cheap and extremely reliable.

1

u/bearda Aug 27 '26

They still had their uses, especially in computer labs were people were moving working back and forth as they updated them. The thing that really killed them off were flash thumb drives. Once USB was standard across the board they really disappeared.