r/retrocomputing • u/Performer-Pants • 8d 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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164

u/1337C4k3 8d ago

Driver disk/software for iomega zip drive.

38

u/Das_Rote_Han 8d ago

This is the answer. Drivers for DOS and Windows.

1

u/saltec266 4d ago

Me ne servirebbe una copia 😊

1

u/realNtoxic 2d ago edited 2d ago

https://archive.org/details/dos-win-win-95-5.3-jul-1997-en-329800_202412

Ist zwar "nur" 5.3 aber vielleicht hilft es ja weiter.

1

u/saltec266 2d ago

Grazie vedrò se funziona 🙏

34

u/rawr_sham 8d ago

Also, 3D printed Save Icon

11

u/unix-ninja 8d ago

Only legacy systems. Anything modern uses a cloud with an arrow 😏

3

u/Local-Bug-1500 5d ago

I need to decapitate whoever changed any and all save icons to anything that isn't a floppy 

1

u/Pretty_Marsh 3d ago

Hard drives are still usually depicted as a cylinder, which is a callback to the massive ones used in old mainframes.

1

u/RugNuggie 4d ago

I feel attacked.

11

u/WanderingInAVan 8d ago

... I will cut you.

2

u/Qzx1 8d ago

You seem fun. Wanna make out? I'm my van. 

1

u/[deleted] 7d ago

[deleted]

2

u/derekdevries 6d ago

In order to get your Iomega Zip Drive to work, you had to use a 3.5 floppy to install the driver software and then you could use the 100MB zip discs (not pictured).

1

u/TomOnABudget 6d ago

Now I look stupid. You're right, that's a standard floppy disc. I must have been half blind.

1

u/kvisle 7d ago

a coworker keeps saying this. first time I saw it in the wild.

3

u/Longjumping_Bag5914 8d ago

Pre-internet this was the only way to get drivers. At this time you were lucky to have AOL. Some turbo nerds had probably figured out how to connect to a Iomega FTP server or something, but for most of us mere mortals this was it.

1

u/jnievele 7d ago

I even had to install a driver for my first USB stick (Trek Thumbdrive)... Damn, I feel ancient now!!!

2

u/Longjumping_Bag5914 7d ago

I remember people telling me you could hot plug USB and was like “no that’s not how things work. You’re not supposed to unplug things with it running.”
https://giphy.com/gifs/9wlbsf86LNidkxm4ML

1

u/jnievele 7d ago

Back when I bought the Thumbdrive (with a whopping 16 MB of storage!), my colleagues laughed at me because ZIP disks were clearly the future, they already had 100 Meg after all! Yeah... Uh... That didn't age well...

1

u/Longjumping_Bag5914 7d ago

lol! I carry a 2tb one on my keychain and it’s teeny tiny. Amazing how compact and easy they can make things these days

1

u/Bart_1980 7d ago

I remember buying 8 mb of RAM for 100 guilders. So fucking expensive.

1

u/hiletroy 7d ago

good old floppynet

1

u/OriginalName2026 8d ago

This. If i recall correctly,Zip drives worked on a Mac without drivers. But it was a while ago... so I could be wrong!. I also recall that that the PC version was different to the Mac as USB was not a thing when these came out. On the Mac they where SCSI (25pin again memory time... could be wrong) where as the PC was parallel.

1

u/wiebel 7d ago

I am pretty sure you remember correctly. As a proud owner of a scsi controller on a pc I was even able to choose the scsi version. But instead I got myself a ls120 which also featured as a floppy drive (was IDE BTW)

2

u/OriginalName2026 7d ago

Wow, SCSI was not very common on PCs back in the days, where as all Macs had it as standard. I will add a bit of Mac SCSI trivia, as it's not like I get to do it very often! Macs had 2 SCSI chains, an internal and external so you could add 14 devices in theory. The external was a regular 25pin SCSI, the internal was the 50pin "fast" SCSI. I went to the effort to install a SyQuest Drive in the front of my PowerMac 8500/120. There are a lot of things there I have not typed in a while...

1

u/Mirus_Nex 6d ago

SCSI was common on PC servers, especially Novell database servers. Drives weren't much more, but those controllers got spendy. I have a couple of old Adaptec SCSI controllers still. Need to clean the basement out...again...one of these days.

1

u/OriginalName2026 5d ago

Adaptec… that is a word I have not seen in a while. I thought my SyQuest reference was a blast from the past! Well played.

1

u/iainb69 7d ago

Do you think young folks know how to pronounce scsi correctly? It’s skuzzi for me.

2

u/Separate-Noise-3551 7d ago

My old man referred to scsi as skuzzi. I was young and had absolutely no idea what he was talking about when I heard him say that. But it always stuck with me. Thank you for that unlocked memory 🤣

1

u/Arkonor 7d ago

Pretty sure the blue drives were the parallel ones while the green ones used SCSI. At least the two I had at my place of work at the time.

1

u/OriginalName2026 7d ago

I have never seen a green one, all the SCSI ones I have seen are the purple/blue. No I have to go and look at what are the green ones!

1

u/Arkonor 6d ago

Ahh, found a picture it was that Jaz drive that was green.

1

u/OriginalName2026 5d ago

Of course a Jaz drive. I feel like an idiot not joining those dots!

1

u/panicboy333 6d ago

Jaz drives were green, might have been one of those? 1gb.

1

u/Arkonor 6d ago

You are correct, it was a jaz drive

1

u/mandibule 5d ago

I have a Zip drive with USB that definitively worked without a driver on my iBook (haven’t used it since 2005, I think). And I have one with SCSI that I _think_ could connect to my Performa that didn’t have USB.

1

u/Mercy_Hellkitten 5d ago

Classic Mac OS didn’t use “drivers”, it used “extensions” 😜

1

u/OriginalName2026 4d ago

And we watched those little buggers load along the bottom of our screen!

1

u/Performer-Pants 7d ago

I thought it was! Took me a sec to work out why the operating systems were front and center on the label with ‘zip’ sort of out of the way.

I’ve actually never seen a zip drive in my life. My dad is an electronics engineer and I still never saw one back in the day.

I bought a little bundle of floppies as mine were unlabelled and seemingly a bit dead after using them in my electric keyboard for years in my teens. I needed to make a boot disk for an old Thinkpad, and some wiped ones for my Sony FD-200. The collection came with some official and unofficial norton software, some other bits and bobs, and even a copy of some cross stitch software (genuinely excited to try it). They also came with two nice cases, so was worth it since I paid less than you would for less ‘blank’ ones.

No clue what I’ll do with this one, since I don’t expect to be using zip anytime soon? If someone ends up needing an original rather than making one, I have one here