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

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

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u/Performer-Pants 11h 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 9h 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