Zip drives: An ode to late '90s technology

I was cleaning through the car for the first time in a few years the other weekend, and what do I find?



Yes. Those.

Found another a couple weeks later, when doing some long-delayed unpacking.

I mean, I haven't seen one of these disks for sale since 2003, probably. I was wondering why Office Depot was unloading them at 60 percent off. I don't think I've seen a Kinko's with one of these things in years, either.

I remember having to lug these things around back in the days I did some Quark work, and didn't have Quark on my computer. I'd have to plug in my Zip drive at Kinko's, cram my files into 100mb, and cart this bulky thing around all day.

Now I can store about 100 times as much data on a thumb drive at about a third of the price I paid for those monstrosities.

Anyway, the whole deal behind this rant ... I now have some files I'd like to save -- they're not that important, if I haven't noticed them MIA for five years -- but no way to retrieve 'em. I even tried buying a used Zip drive and installing it on my Macbook ... but Mac OSX doesn't support the software.

Ah, the early Internet era.

 

The bigger story here is ... you were cleaning your car for the first time "in a few years"?

 

Some people aren't that squeamish about blood stains.

 

Wicked, I have a bunch of crap like that that I've kept for no good reason. I have a box with zip drives, 3.5 floppies, and some 5 and a quarter floppies.

 

A bunch of my early stories and pages are saved on a 100-meg zip drive. Doubt I will ever be able to retrieve them, even though the whole thing would take 10 seconds to upload on e-mail nowadays.

 

Just saw someone carry a Zip Drive today. I have no idea where he was going to install it.