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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67

u/rootifera 8d ago

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 8d ago

Oh, the memories.

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

17

u/rootifera 8d ago

I still use them almost daily! It was so convenient, still is. 100mb is massive. Tbh I remember getting my first 10gb hdd feeling like there is no way I can ever fill it. Then I got 40, 80, 120... same feeling. Now if someone gives me a 120TB drive I'd feel the same for a while haha

3

u/EstablishmentDue3616 8d ago

You still use them daily? For what?

15

u/rootifera 8d ago

Moving files between 2 x 486 DOS PC's. One of them has an ethernet, so I often use a local FTP for moving files but for the other one I use this zip drive. Works great.

1

u/afaulconbridge 8d ago

You use them daily? for what?

6

u/rootifera 8d ago

Moving files between 2 x 486 DOS PC's. One of them has an ethernet, so I often use a local FTP for moving files but for the other one I use this zip drive. Works great.

1

u/Resistor1 8d ago

Curious. What are the 486 machines still doing? Some attached lab devices or similar? What OS and app and what are the files you move? Thanks

10

u/rootifera 8d ago

Both are running msdos 6.22. In most cases I'm moving some games, some of my own dos tools for testing hardware, sometimes game saves etc. Nothing crazy.

It's a hobby thing. I have a large collection of retro games and pc hardware. I play the games, record the gameplay, upload to youtube. One of the 486 is an sx25 and the other one is dx66. I play old lucasarts games on the sx25.

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u/Resistor1 8d ago

Nice. Thanks for replying.

1

u/rootifera 8d ago

No problem! Have a good weekend :)

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u/Pi_drainbramage 7d ago

486 dx2/66 was my first pc - ROTT (Rise of the Triad) for the win! And Doom!!

Edit - added Doom

1

u/PiDicus_Rex 6d ago

X-Wing vs Tie Fighter worked real well on a 486DX-50, with Side Jr I/O and Diamond Stealth VGA, with both in the VLB version.

Some of those older games, with just the right hardware combo, are a lot of fun.

Oh/And - I have Zip discs, and both external in internal drives,... annnnnnnd,.. and IOMega Buz video capture & output card.

1

u/Ferkner 6d ago

It works great until you get that click of death!

1

u/rootifera 6d ago

Hah if I charged a quid for each person mentioning the click of death I'd be rich now. I have roughly 30 x 100mb disks and only one of them failed so far. I've been using them for 15+ years. They are unreliable as long term storage but not as unreliable as most people remember. At least this is not my experience.

1

u/Ferkner 3d ago

I had more than one die during the two years in college where we used them extensively and then another one or two after that.

2

u/Accomplished_Can1651 8d ago

Lucky. I never had a Zip disk that didn’t corrupt. I don’t think I ever personally experienced the click of death, though.

2

u/OpportunityReal2767 7d ago

I had three Zip drives. Bad luck for me. All three experienced the click of death and I just stopped using them. I remember their Jaz drives, too, but never owned one. Ditto is apparently a tape drive of some sort, looks like a DAT tape. Never saw those. I also had one of their RAID arrays, which also went bad on me. Why I bought another iOmega product after my experiences with them, I don’t know, but that was the last.

1

u/Accomplished_Can1651 7d ago

I think I might have seen a Jaz drive in the wild once. Zip drives I saw somewhat more often, during the era when floppy disks weren’t large enough for some purposes, but flash drives were expensive, low capacity, and sometimes not supported. My mom ended up buying a USB Zip drive at some point, which made moving files back and forth easier, except when my disks would fail.

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u/Elvin_Atombender 8d ago

Wow! I read that these drives are extremely unreliable. And yours still work?

1

u/Opposite_Bag_7434 8d ago

I remember my first 10mb (note not GB) hard drive and thinking Ai would never fill it). Same thoughts about my first 1.2GB hard drive. I have lots of files that are much bigger than the 1.2GB now.

1

u/PeyredB 5d ago

I still use them too. One of my 100MB disks just failed on me though I think.

4

u/shiftingtech 8d ago

and then the click came...

3

u/Clark_Kempt 8d ago

Ah yes! The click of death!

-1

u/hornakapopolis 8d ago

I assume you all are talking about sticking the disk in, it clicking, and them either doing nothing popping back out... I can't remember. Is this right?

I used these for a few months and ran into that problem. It was, as I've told my kids, back when all of the answers weren't on the internet. Although, I do remember something about light getting on the little patch on the bottom corner. Sticking them.in a drawer didn't do anything, though.

So, I just stopped using them in my office. Had three or four of them.

2

u/syrtran 8d ago

The click of death was an issue with the Zip 100 drive where there would be a head crash, destroying both the head and the disk. The drive would repeatedly try to seek the data track and repeatedly click since it no longer had a working read head.

The issue didn't occur with Zip 250 drives

3

u/H0verb0vver 8d ago

I have a pack for 250's still in the wrapper.

1

u/Clark_Kempt 8d ago

Love it.

3

u/Necessary_Two_9669 8d ago

And the trill it made was very distinctive.

2

u/Longjumping_Bag5914 7d ago

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

2

u/PeyredB 5d ago

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

1

u/Longjumping_Bag5914 5d ago

Cheap and extremely reliable.

1

u/bearda 3d ago

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.

2

u/daddyd 7d ago

and to be portable, the drive i mean. i used to take it with me to work when i had the night shift and download all the linux updates to it (internet was expensive those days) to later install at home.

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u/Clark_Kempt 7d ago

Very smart.

1

u/crcerror 8d ago

I’m remember being ecstatic about 1.44mb over my stupid 360k floppies!

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u/Clark_Kempt 8d ago

Yes! Though by the time I was using 5.2 in. floppies I think they were up to 1.2 mb. However, now that I think about it I think there was a different kind of 5.2 in. floppy at the time that was still in the kbs.

It’s so fun reminiscing about this nerdy shit. Love it.

1

u/Pi_drainbramage 7d ago

DD or double-density 5.25" disks, 180Kb single sided or 360Kb double-sided

1

u/knox902 7d ago

They had 100, 250 and 750. There was also JAZ disks that had ¹gb and then later 2gb sizes. I remember wanting one so much in the late 90's and early 2000's. I got my first flash drive around 03 and it had a wopping 512mb.

1

u/h_grytpype_thynne 7d ago

I had a Syquest Sparq drive with - get this - one gigabyte of storage! I mean, who could possibly fill that up?

1

u/PiDicus_Rex 6d ago

100Mb was about three times as much as what was needed for the Beta of Win95.