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Why Zip drives dominated the 90s, then vanished almost overnight (www.xda-developers.com)
submitted 5 months ago by [M, B] to c/hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
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[–] 32 points 5 months ago (12 children)

They vanished like everything in life that people had to suffer because there was no other choice: as soon as something better appeared, everybody ditched the hateful thing.

Then newer generations who didn't actually have to use the shit to do actual work revive it and called it vintage. Not for me: ZIP and JAZ drives are dead and they should stay dead. Good riddance.

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  • [–] 12 points 5 months ago (10 children)

    A couple years ago on reddit I saw a post lamenting the death of....the minidisc.

    Old portable storage tech sucked. Good riddance is right

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  • [–] 8 points 5 months ago* (5 children)

    Except for music. It is ok to mourn the loss of universal physical media for music.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (2 children)

    Mini cds were never common or universial. CDs where. So were cassettes and vinyl. There were a lot of niche formats. 8track got really close to common, I will say they didn't but someon should argue otherwise and you should consider their point.

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  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    Minidisc was insanely good technology; the problem was that it was crazy expensive proprietary tech. So almost no one used it, and never really took off.

    But I loved mine.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (2 children)

    Maybe it is cool but my point is that old storage tech offers no benefits to what we have now. It's not a bad thing when technology is superceded with zero compromise

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago

    It's funny because within the past year or so people are looking at Zip Drives like it was the second coming of storage, like this novelty "vintage" tech. but as someone who lived through that age and owned at least 3 or 4 drives myself they sucked. They broke constantly. Like I said I went through at least 3 of them. Once CD-R/RW drives became affordable there was no looking back. and then DVD-R drives were just so much better.

    If at the time you were dependent on them for storage or backups it was a crap shoot. Sure you could backup your stuff but would you eventually be able to retrieve said backups if your drive went to hell? was it even worth it at that point? no.

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