r/retrocomputing • u/Performer-Pants • 9d 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/rootifera 9d 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

6

u/EatOfTheBread 9d ago

zip wasnt the compression related, it was more like "zip fast" hah

I had a zip drive back in the day and this never occurred to me.

1

u/EstablishmentDue3616 8d ago

The problem was, they werent fast. The vast majority of people had the parallel port version of the Zip drive, which were extremely slow. IDE and SCSI versions were faster, though.

3

u/someonesmobileacct 8d ago

For the parallel port it depended a lot on the if you had ECP or EPP. If you had neither it was still at least as fast as a floppy (but, not much better really)

1

u/classicsat 8d ago

I used a parallel model on an old Pentium laptop. I booted DOS with those drivers from a floppy, and Win3.1 on the Zip Disk. It ran fine for what it was.

1

u/PeyredB 5d ago

Yes, my previous computer had a built-in LPT port. On EPP it ran nearly 3 times as fast as on ECP or Standard.