Killed By Zip: The Rise and Fall of SyQuest
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- Опубликовано: 3 мар 2022
- In the 80s and early 90s, when people needed to make their data portable and a floppy disk wouldn't do, they often used a SyQuest drive. But in 1994, that all changed.
Sources:
Syed Iftikar photo: www.storagenewsletter.com/202...
"Industry hails SyQuest's 3.9-inch hard-disk drive," InfoWorld, December 20, 1982.
Seagate ST-225 photo: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
Computer Chronicles, "Desktop Publishing, Part 1": • The Computer Chronicle...
"The Bernoulli Solution," PC Magazine, September 18, 1984.
"The Box Is Full of Air," InfoWorld, July 29, 1985.
"Iomega Expands Disk Drive Family With Bernoulli Box II," InfoWorld, September 7, 1987.
"The Bernoulli Box from Iomega incorporates new disk technology," InfoWorld, October 10, 1983.
Storage product comparison, InfoWorld, April 2, 1990.
SyQuest 200MB cartridge photo: upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...
"Iomega adds Zip to the storage market," InfoWorld, April 10, 1995.
"Iomega puts some ZIp in removable storage market," InfoWorld, May 1, 1995.
"Micron offers Zip as a default disk drive," InfoWorld, February 23, 1998.
"SyQuest sues French company over cartridges," InfoWorld, April 12, 2993.
"Iomega to market cartridges," InfoWorld, May 9, 1993.
"SyQuest enters retail; Iomega debuts software," InfoWorld, May 9, 1994.
"SyQuest, Iomega settle dispute over cartridge license," InfoWorld, June 20, 1994.
"SyQuest to Cut 60% of Work Force and Post a Loss," New York Times, February 3, 1996.
"Mass Data Appeal," PC Magazine, April 22, 1997.
"SyQuest charges founder with theft of trade secrets", Silicon Valley Business Journal, www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/s...
"Removable Storage," PC Magazine, April 21, 1996.
"Zip Drive Death Click Is for Real," PC World, May 1998.
"Troubled SyQuest Technology Suspends its Operations", New York Times, November 4, 1998.
Computer Chronicles, "Comdex 1998": • The Computer Chronicle...
"Storage Companies Found Dead," Maximum PC, February 1999.
"Watchdog," Maximum PC, March 1999.
"Iomega Sues Castlewood Over Patents, Trademarks," techmonitor.ai/techonology/io...
2GB Jaz cartridge photo: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
External CD burner photo: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
"Oral History of Syed Iftikar," www.computerhistory.org/colle...
"More Room to Store," PC Magazine, January 19, 1999.
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The look of that first Zip drive was a master stroke on Iomega's part IMHO. The Zip looked like a cool piece of consumer tech that you'd want to own, compared to the boring beige box look of the Syquest drives of the early-'90s.
Agreed, it made storage look cool, I always liked the dark blue finish.
I still have mine stored in a box, must fire it up again some day.
Did they ever figure out what caused the click of death?
Good advertising campaign too.
@@ericBcreator Me too. At the time, i even had a battery pack for the Zip drive.
Intresting the Zip drive was not the biggest, best or really anything at the time. There was also plenty of alternative that was smaller.
What Zip had was a somewhat low price and a large marketing campaign.
Of cause Syquest was never ment as a consumer product. There was a very small market for a portable media that expensive for consumers.
While the original zip drive did sell well, with the Parallel port interface it was both clumsy and slow. yea sure, much faster than a floppy, but still fairly slow.
IT was really when the IDE and later USB version was made that the sails spiked. Both considerably faster and less bulky, and more so cheaper. With a price tag of $200 and a bulky parralel interface, it might not be a hard sell, but a lot of people just didn´t buy it.
When it dropped down to $100 (and below) and you could get it installed in the computer internally, it was a way simpler buy.
I always found SqQuests reliable but they always sounded like they were on the verge of rattling themselves apart. The distinctive sound of a rushed designer ejecting a still-spinning drive would probably trigger a stress reaction in me, even 25 years after I last heard it.
definitely the sound nightmares are made of!
I remember using these regularly back in the day. My parents bought a 200mb one it to do backups for their business. I was given my own disk to keep my games and school stuff separate. My dad later had an EzDrive for his CAD machine. They were superior to ZIP, but yeah, the disks were expensive. CD burners ultimately killed both. Especially universal disc format, that let you treat a CD-RW like a mass storage device. You could get a whole stack of RWs for the price of a Zip Disk.
You should teach Kiryu-chan about it, he doesn't even know what a "seedy rawm" is
I still have a Fujitsu GigaMO 2.3GB magneto-optical drive that I use for storing financial records, due to the built-in error correction in the MO format. Also it gives me an excuse to use a MO drive.
i was doing IT support for small business. I install Syquest drive in my customers. WE all lost out.
@@deusexaethera Yea, that is a bit strange, there was load of MO format on the market, but it would seam like they really didn´t compete.
Granted, they was quite a bit slower. But mostly so in search, if you where mostly storing data it really don´t matter that much.
If sony wasn´t that stubern and market MD as a cheap desktop drive, it would probobly have won the market.
In the early ’90s I worked in an output service bureau in Vancouver. We had several workstation, mostly Macs, and at least one of every popular removable media drive. Each day I would pick a computer at which to get comfortable, grab a handful of dockets, and copy files over to the computer to start troubleshooting, load fonts, and prepare files for print.
I started an hour before opening to start up computers, put the coffee on, and get the photo processors for the high resolution Linotronic imagesetters. This gave me my choice of computer, which I usually chose for location rather than model, and the change to hook up a removable drive option. At the time, 5.25" Syquest was still most popular, so I usually used that, based on what media the jobs in the physical drop box used. I would also distribute the other drives (Zip, Bernoulli, Fujitsu optical, 3.5" Syquest) to the other workstations so the other workers wouldn’t need to shut down to add them later.
Inevitably my ambition to deal exclusively with one type of media would lose priority to the schedule of the day. A rush job would come in, I would be the next available operator (we called these NAO jobs), and I would have to grab that docket. Often that meant loading a different media. The official procedure was to either take over the workstation using that drive, have the operator of that workstation stop what they were doing and copy the files for me to a server, or shut down both systems to swap drives because you never hit swap SCSI devices. Guess which one we usually did?
As far as I know, not swapping SCSI devices never was a problem. Eventually we devoted an older system to be the media reader. Five or so different drives were connected to one workstation and when you needed files from removable media you used that computer and complied them to your computer over the network. This added a new bottleneck as operators often had to wait for the system to be available. This led to my solution, which was about once every couple of hours someone would grab every upcoming job using removable media (they had a different coloured envelope) and copy them all to the computer’s hard drive. Later, the operator working on that job would copy the files to their workstation to prepare the output. No duplicate drives, no competition for devices, and no dangerous hot swapping or time consuming shut downs.
What I remember about the different media is that Syquests were faster than the other, and had a satisfying click when the cartridge was properly seated in the drive. Fujitsu magneto optical was slowest but had high capacity and, being newer than the others, was rare. Zip, when it arrived, became very popular very quickly due to the low cost of both drives and cartridges. At the time 100 MB was squally enough, especially since we did a lot of the scanning for our customers and only supplied low res proxy files for scans. The high res files were already in the shop, so didn’t take up space on the cartridges. It wasn’t uncommon to get a job that required two or three Zips to load, but that was still cheaper than a 200 MB Syquest drive and cartridge and wasn’t nearly as inconvenient as the old low budget solution - a shoebox full of floppies.
In the end I remember removable media became almost a non issue. Zip and built in optical drives (CD ROM and DVD ROM) were the last hurrah if physical media. Most jobs came in through the internet via FTP. Most of our clients were professional designers and had high speed internet. Those that didn’t tended to have smaller, simpler files that could transfer via dial up.
I ended up taking some of the drives home when we dumbed them. I used a 2.5" Syquest (not the EZ Drive) for backups for a while, until I bought a DVD burner, and that was the last I saw of removable cartridges.
It remind be of the early to mid 1980s, when there were so many competing computer platforms and it wasn’t obvious that only two would survive.
No data formats survive if you extend the timeframe long enough.
I still have a Fujitsu GigaMO 2.3GB magneto-optical drive that I use for storing financial records, due to the built-in error correction in the MO format. Also it gives me an excuse to use a MO drive.
Awesome to hear about how it was on the inside. Thanks for sharing. :)
Signed,
Someone who would drop off 270MB Syquest drives at a service bureau for Linotronic output.
MO was around longer than zip if you count the 5 1/4" variety.
I worked in a small desktop publishing company. I persuaded my boss to invest in SyQuest drives as we were still using floppy disks to back up all our work. I only ever had one failure of a SyQuest drive, it was an 88mb one in adbout 1995. I found them extremely useful. Never really used zip disks at all. Very good video!
I started a graphic design business back in 1995 using nothing but a single Zip drive, a few cartridges, and some time in the University Mac labs where I was going to school. Today that business is an ad agency with 25 years under its belt doing a million dollars plus business annually. I couldn't have gotten it off the ground without my trusty Zip drive.
The "Winchester" style drives were pretty common in the mainframes in the 1970s, which had huge 10" or even 12" platters which could be removed and stored in cartridges which resembed pizza boxes. Most of them were top loading instead of front loading though.
I remember these things. They were all over the DTP industry and they were more often than not laden with viruses because they were passed around dozens of repro, design houses and printers. Yes, Macs had viruses.
Everything has viruses.
@@deusexaethera I’ve never had a virus on Mac since 2003.
Ha! I remember the good old days of blocking out an hour or two to wipe/reformat removable discs on a fairly regular basis. Norton Utilities was a good friend back then.
@@trashyraccoon2615 that you knew about. Don't be a rube, they were rife and omnipresent.
@@SpaceDave3000 Any articles or evidence that points to this? Anti virus software never really sold well on Macs for a reason
Back in the day - Zip just seemed to be absolutely everywhere - all systems *had* to have one in - at my school, all the mac's had them, about 20% of the PC's had the Zip drives built in, too. Then CD-R's became a thing and then Zip and Jaz just faded away, almost overnight.
If you ever want to delve into Magneto Optical stuff, I can send you a drive and some media to try out :)
MO Discs are pretty neat. I still have a few stacks, new old stock I picked up last year. Sometimes I use them to transfer/archive files to my x68000.
Ahhh, the 90's, where tech came and went in the blink of an eye.
oh the Zip drive became some common because of what it really did - it gave us reasonably fast, reasonably cheap, reasonably large disks in an era where 1.44 MB just wasn't enough for anything other than a Unix online install disk, etc.
I was an early adopter and made sure to get the SCSI version, despite the fact that I had to pay an extra hundred bucks for the controller card - sadly a few friends didn't bother to read the specs and got themselves the parallel version. One actually stuck with that version, even after seeing how mine performed. The parallel version was like a read/write tape drive without all of the retensioning, etc - super slow. The SCSI version was a slightly slow hard disk with a low seek time - but for that era, that was enough. I used to bring mine into the Mac lab and booted via the Zip drive - it ran just fine, even running Photoshop, etc.
Frankly, it was almost as good as the SyQuest drives that we had in a few labs (and I still have an 88MB cart around still), and media was 20 bucks a pop or less, not 50 or more. :D
When the IDE/ATAPI version showed up, no shock it became a standard feature for a few years there.
I forgot to add my comments about early CD-ROM burners, as it was a completely different experience than people have now. In '96 or so a group of my friends pooled money to buy a quad speed burner - a Yamaha (the best brand at the time). It was a SCSI unit, and you had to insert the CD into a caddy vs having a slide tray like modern drives (when you still see them lol). This quad speed burner cost US$1200, and blank disks were $12 a pop on our first order - it went down to $8 each on second order and kept dropping until it was about $4 a disc for a while - then a few years later the 30-packs started showing up at office supply stores and Best Buy and the price hit the buck each we paid for most of that era.
Burning a disc was understood to be the sole activity of the PC until it was completed - all other software (including most systray apps) was shut down and you might even disconnect the ethernet cable just to be sure nothing would trigger some app from launching at the wrong time... for you see, once you begin writing a CD-ROM session, you must complete it without running out of data to write, or the whole burn fails. This was a real concern even when using a relatively pimped out machine for the era... "buffer underrun" was the thing to be worried about, and all of the burner software prominently displayed how much data was in the buffer - any time it got low, you got worried, and when it was mostly full you could relax a bit. We had many coasters in that first year... 12 bucks a pop for the initial ones, for poor ass college students who just wanted some warez... :D
Luckily these days the bus can transfer much more data, and drives can copy much faster, and SSDs don't ever have to wait for a head to move or a platter to spin... but in the mid 90s, you could either get a winning CD that became an awesome tool, or some place to set down your can of pop and not get the table wet.
I remember Zip drive for Sega Dreamcast
I loved the clamshell cases that the 44's and 88's were stored in. For years I opened up 5-10 per day, processing files for our designer clients. The cases had kind of a snug fit when they closed so they made this "pop" sound when you pried them open; I still remember that sound :)
I remember clients were very zealous about getting their SyQuest back, too. They'd have labels and asset tags and often custom branded clamshells. Zip disks usually would just have a business card and maybe a directory printout thrown in.
i remember that sound!
Oh man, you are bringing me back! They had a distinctive smell also.
I remember when Zips came out, and I had one of the first drives out of anyone I knew. I used to bring the drive, and the disk to my local Image Bureau (remember those) to get my films produced to make printing plates. They were so impressed that they bought a drive themselves... Those were the days!
Oh man, just the thought of the name "Sparq" still gives me chills. I had gone through 3 drives and 5 disks with first hand experience of data corruption and drive failures. The first drive had a head crash, accompanied by a dreadful grinding noise and resulting in a damaged starter disk. You could actually see the head element hanging off the arm by a thin wire inside. Once the second drive was damaged by the same disk, that's how I learnt about cross-drive damage via bad disks the hard way. It took some years later, a 3rd drive off ebay and some good luck rituals to recover the data from all the disks, including the damaged one, and never used them since. Ah, but back in the days of Napster downloads before having access to a CD burner, it was a neat thing for a while, though it taught me a valuable lesson not to place all your eggs in one basket (disk) and to back up regularly.
That's just crazy how the same disk can cause multiple drives to crash! Like a virus or something. Did any other format have problems like this?
@@tulippasta Iomega's Zip drives had that problem with bad disks damaging read/write heads, which in turn damaged other disks read in that same drive.
I have been there too. I had an external and internal SparQ. The ATAPI drive died quickly and the external SparQ just chewed up drive after drive or refused to read them. I was really tempted by the Orb after seeing adverts everywhere but the SparQ ended up burning a real hole in my wallet and I'm glad in retropspect that I forwent the shonky Castlewood product. I now have SCSI Zip and Jaz drives for my vintage computers and those have held up fine. I had forgotten. how noisy these drives all were though. I thought the Jaz drive was performing a SparQ tribute act when I first powered it up with a disk in until I realised that it was just things were back then.
Thanks for reminding me of Napster - fun times.
Despite being a technology nerd, I don't think I've ever heard of this. I never had a ZipDisk but the Click of Death seemed more ubiquitous than you made it seem here, as it also had the "disks affected pass on the click to other drives" failing.
I think it might be the other way around -- the Internet has made Click of Death out to be more than it really was. I remember hearing about it a couple years after I no longer cared much about ZIP disks. Mine had always been fine, and everyone I knew that used them were fine, too. (Although I didn't know heaps of people using them.)
I would imagine it would be different if you were a member of an institution where they were heavily deployed. Like a school or office that relied on them for daily operations. I did end up using Orb disks for one class I took in Uni, but other than that, it was basically floppy or CD for information interchange. I was never in a position where one person with a shredded disk would just start taking out drives, and having the problem escalate from there. I think that experience would likely change one's perspective of the failure rate.
EDIT: Just wanted to add, I have gotten into retro stuffs in the last few years and now have maybe a dozen ZIP drives -- internal ATA and SCSI, external SCSI and parallel. No issues, other than acquiring a couple DOA drives that never worked at all, for one reason or another.
@@nickwallette6201 On the contrary. We used them at my former employer. Click of Death was ubiquitous. Even worse, you could get "disk clap" where one failing drie would affect the mechanism of a disk, which would then damage the mechanism of a "clean" drive when inserted into it. We went through DOZENS of drives on one government system we were trying to qualify.
@@dennisp.2147 Yeah, I'm familiar with the failure mode:
If a disk had damaged media, it would snag the heads of a working drive, and either misalign them or rip them off completely. That drive would then damage the media on any inserted disks, and so on.
It's a bit of a house-of-cards situation, which is what I was saying previously about this being widespread in any shared-use institution. It would take out a lot of drives in the area of influence of that patient-zero disk, and spread from there.
But, if you had a single drive at home that you used with only your media, the chances of this problem happening to you seem fairly low. You would have to be the Patient Zero Disk owner.
Apparently later models weren't quite as robust, having been cost-cut more, and thus failing more often, when Iomega succumbed to the same market realities that had taken out all of their competitors: Third-party media, hardware cost pressure, and rewritable optical drives and solid-state media.
@@nickwallette6201 It was bad enough that the Fortune 500 company that I worked for banned their use on any in-house systems and their inclusion in any designs for clients. Hardly what I would call isolated.
@@dennisp.2147 Well, again, I think that depends on how it's used. The idea of (relatively) high-speed, high-precision, close-tolerance removable magnetic media was probably doomed from the start because of the potential for widespread damage. BUT, it seems like there were hot spots of cascading failures, and then a lot of individuals who used them with carefully-handled disks, and never had an issue.
In that sense, the perceived scope of the phenomenon itself varies wildly by your proximity to a cascade of failures. There are a lot of us out there who used them for years, and have nothing but fond memories. And now I use a whole fleet of them to carry larger files between my retro computers, nearly all used, and they're all fine save for one that never showed up on the ATA bus, and another that wouldn't write reliably.
So yes. I think it's entirely possible the problem is exaggerated. When it happens, it's bad, and it's potentially widespread. But if you never have a disk with badly defective media, you could probably go your whole life without any trouble.
I worked at SyQuest during the very end. Ed Harper held an all hands meeting to give the "The rumors about things being are bad are true but there's still hope so please don't quit yet speech." This was after the previous quarter where the 10-Q said that if they didn't get funding that quarter, they would "no longer be an ongoing concern". Afterwards there was a "not going out of business sale" where employees could buy office equipment. But no! Not going out of business.
During the meeting, Ed when on and on how nobody told him there was quality issues. I don't know if that was true or not, but the guy whose job it was to tell him most certainly knew.
Marketing also knew the end was near. They started treating trade shows as parties for themselves and not clients.
Contracting agencies started getting bad checks. The C suite didn't tell agencies, the contractors, or even their own employees about this. The contractors just got a call from the agencies saying the checked bounced and to go home. Their reports ran to accounting begging for something to be done. Some of them were pretty high up and had no idea that the end was near.
Carole King had the master of her new album on a SyQuest. Oops.
At the very end they were trying to release the 4.7GB Rocket.
It was just a cluster fck. Everybody that knew what was coming in the back door or had an ear in tech support or sales knew it was dead man walking. Except for Ed Harper.
I absolutely loved SyQuest drives. Had quite a few back in the day, both a 5.25" 88 MB unit installed in an external SCSI case for my Macs and an internal 3.5" SyQuest EZdrive mounted in my PC. I really did not like Zip disks. The disks themselves just seemed a bit more delicate than SyQuest cartridges. I never had any of the often-talked-about reliability issues with SyQuest drives. And yes, I will freely admit that Zip disks didn't sound as "cool" to me as SyQuest drives. I just loved the "clunk" of engaging the drive lock lever, the whirring noise as the disk came up to speed, the clickety-clack sound as you accessed data on the disk, the reverse whirr as the drive spun down, and the clunk of ejecting the disk. Very hard drive like. Zip disks just sounded too plain and "floppy-like" to me. :) Iomega at least redeemed themselves in my eyes with the Jaz drive. Not only did it have incredible capacity for the time, but it brought back most of those lovely whirr-clickety-clack drive noises. :)
I am surprised you didn't mention the original 3.5" Syquest removable drives that succeeded their 5.25" drives which had capacities of 105MB and 270MB on each cartridge. When the Zip came out, the Syquest 105MB removable drive cost $300 and 105MB carts cost $50 each. As you can imagine, the 105MB drive was dropped like a hot potato immediately. This finally drove SyQuest R&D into high gear to catch up in the price war with Iomega.
One BIG problem with the Zip drives not mentioned here was the fact that they cut corners not just on their reliability, but also in compatibility. Even though the SCSI version was marketed as a SCSI drive, Iomega removed a number of standard SCSI features such as parity, and fixed SCSI IDs that made some SCSI devices incompatible with it. The Zip forced parity and only allowed SCSI IDs 5 and 6, which made them frustrating to set up and use. This was false advertising on Iomega at their best. To make it worse, when engineers dissected the Zip, they said all Iomega had to do was add a component that costed about 5 cents to the circuit board to fix these deficiencies. If Iomega was SO cheap to cut corners that much, I knew reliability issues were going to pop up. My prediction was spot on. The result was the "Click of Death". Of course, great marketing easily covered these defects up to the average consumer, so Iomega didn't care as long as they got the $$$.
Otherwise, great video on Syquest's history. I had the 44MB, 200MB, 270MB models and all were and still are reliable. I just tried out my 200MB and 270MB drives on my Atari ST and both work like a champ.
I know several people who used Zip disks daily for the better part of a decade and none of them ever experience the Click of Death. As with most problems, its frequency of occurrence was greatly exaggerated by angry people who had the bad luck to experience it. Iomega may have cut corners, but they cut corners in ways that didn't affect 99.9% of users.
I also noticed that he left out the 105Mb and the 270Mb SyQuest drives. I had one of these drives and I used it quite a lot with many cartridges, with only one 105Mb drive failing. When the zip 100 first came out, I was very impressed. Shortly after, I heard about the 'Click Of Death' and bought the SyQuest solution instead.
I sold a lot of all the used drives and cartridges during the 2000s, and had very little issues with the SyQuest drives/media, as well as the Jaz drives/media. I used to shudder every time a customer would bring in a zip drive and stated "It's clicking a lot, and I have all these disks to recover..."
I worked at both SyQuest and Castlewood throughout both their history. I have very fond memories of both companies but also experienced the sadness of being part of the downhill spirals of each.
We had a computer that used SyQuest cartridges in my elementary school, it was used for storing programs because the Macintosh didn’t have enough memory. Once Zip disks came out, that’s when our school replaced them. Zip Disks were lighter and were more portable!
Man, I love your content. Your videos are excellent, great quality, montage, playing with focus change on scenes, lots of interesting information - just amazing.
I am still using ZIP disks with my samplers but never heard about systems which you showed up. Thank you!,, it was a great journey!
Having been through the twin misery of zip disks that worked until they didn't, and CDs that could probably only be read in the drive that burned them, I feel we are truly blessed these days by high capacity USB sticks.
Funny you should mention USB sticks. Besides my years at Iomega, I worked on one of the first USB flash drives ('stick'). I wonder if anyone has ever heard of the company - Agate (failed flash in pan).
@@geoffbarton5917 I'm pretty sure I remember that name.
I'd never gotten into any of these formats back in the day.
Went from floppy disks to CD-Rs to DVD-Rs to thumb drives to external hard drives.
But I did pick up a zip 100 drive back a few years ago at a thrift store just out of curiosity.
Also, sd/memory cards to external hard drives to solid state drives.
Love your videos on the competition between Syquest and Iomega. I'm always fascinated by the use of these computer data storage mediums from the late 1980s to 1990s.
I will never forget it. I got totally screwed by Syquest after being loyal for years. I started with the 44meg removable drives. I had the final version of their removable media, a drive and lots of disks, tons of issues. They promised to replace or fix everything if I shipped it to them. A few weeks later they filed bankruptcy and I ended up with NOTHING. They literally had me ship everything I had to them with no intention of repairing or replacing but to use as leverage in the Bankruptcy...a final F you so a loyal customer. I still remember that guys voice I was dealing with, it was a lesson learned for sure.
When I was in middle school, I remember saving up my money to buy a 100MB Zip Drive so I could store all the websites, photos, and games on the "big" disks when all I had was floppies. When my Dad got a CD burner, it was such a change. CD-RW disks were unreliable, but you could store so much more. I ended up saving my money to buy my own CD burner once I was building my own computers from other people's old parts. After helping build a wireless internet provider with a single 1.5Mbps T1 and having "high speed" internet at home, CDs were all we used. Now 128GB is under $50 on a reliable flash drive. Or I can easily just upload files with Starlink and a "free" service like OneDrive to share or move files around.
3:00 huh, funny enough, the last time I saw floppy drives in active daily use (outside the retro sphere) was when I visited a printing press facility.
They said that nothing beats a floppy drive to hold printer settings and color parameters and can stay in the client folder (the paper one).
(I guess upgrading a press that is the size of a bus also contribute to the decision)
I liked iOmega Zip for a while in college, but over time they started to have serious reliability issues for me, to the point where I stopped using the drives and discs altogether. The kicker was when a website that I had designed was completely lost on a dead disk.
I still used floppy drives to do my school assignments in highschool in the mid 2000's. The only other option for me was email and I didn't have a computer at home with internet access, so floppies were the easiest way to work on text assignments at home. I wasn't the only one. Nowadays everyone has internet access but a lot didn't back in the early 2000s.
My home didn't even had Electricity in 2000 dude. XD
Absolutely, in many countries Internet access was slow, costly and time limited. People went online at a certain time of the day to check their e-mails and maybe download entire webpages for offline reading to save money. Being always on as we're today with multiple devices was wishful thinking. Personally I tried to access the Internet on my old Nokia phone in the early 2000s and while it technically worked it wasn't worth the effort, absolutely unusable (the dreaded WAP, a very bad attempt at formatting webpages for old phones, but to their credit the technology simply wasn't there..)
Same here! Though we had dialup, it was far more convenient to copy the document to a floppy and toss it in my bag.
Excellent video!! I had no idea about the Sparq and Orb media. I remember seeing ZIP disks at a friends house and was in complete envy seeing him move around large files with ease and such small portability. At the time I was in college and couldn't afford one but wanted one so badly. I remember going through 2 zip drives and them both eventually failing. Long live CD/DVD drives!
Fantastic video Colin ! I had not heard of any of these apart from the Zip drive. Really cool that you managed to get an example of each drive to show in the video.
Hi Colin, this video gave me so much nostalgia, the sound of the drives spin-up and spin-down still stays with me.
That "A drive called SyQuest" title pun was the best I've seen in quite a long while.
I wonder how many of "the kids" got the joke...
@@dennisp.2147 I was asking myself the same question. Then I concluded that I probably don't want to know :)
Boy does this bring back memories, the sound of a bad disk spinning up or getting ejected while still spinning is a thing of nightmares
Great video. Interesting from start to finish. I'm impressed you had all those drives to include!
A fascinating history - thank you. Even the ads were nostalgic!
I used to own a SparQ, I think it was around 1998. I can confirm the damage issue. It was like a form of hardware virus... by the moment I realized what was going on, I had the drive replaced 2 times under warranty (must have cost a fortune to SyQuest) and lost several disks, with all its data, and quickly lost interest in the format. Hard drives also got significant increases in capacity which helped making such solutions less useful to individuals, and soon enough CD-burners started becoming affordable and popular, too.
Now there's a blast from the past! When studying for my multimedia degree in the late 90s, the university used SyQuest drives so students can save their files as floppy disks were just too small. The reputation of the SyQuests drives wasn't good: highly unreliable. Some of us, including me, moved to Iomega ZIP 100 and never had a failure. When I got my first job, I convinced my employer to get them and never looked back. We eventually upgraded to Iomega Jaz, but these discs WERE unreliable, we ditched them for the 750MB ZIP. Eventually, we started to use network storage as it was more cost-effective. I have fond memories of ZIP, a total lifesaver.
I had a Zip drive, Jaz *and* a Sparq (at different times). The Zip worked well for me but I just didn't need it - it wasn't enough capacity for archiving, and I didn't ever have a need to transport 100MB worth of files around. The Jaz and Sparq I thought could be useful because the cartridges were so massive and cheap, so I could buy multiples and use them as backups or archives. But both ended up failing on me - I can't remember if it was the cartridges or drives or both, but ultimately it didn't matter. The tech just wasn't reliable and I ended up stopping use of both drives after buying only my initial cartridge for each. Just moved on to CD-R afterwards, which was a downgrade in capacity but the size of the discs meant I could store a bunch in a smaller space. And CD-R's were reliable and cheaper. I still have basically all of my CD-R archives from that era and they all still work (as far as I know, but I do grab something off them every now and then).
Wow, I remember seeing the Orb in stores briefly and I also used Zip back in the day, but I had no idea a 750MB Zip Drive was ever a thing.
Same here, but it came out too late in 2002. It would've been a game changer if it was released in 98 or 99.
@@maroon9273 Yeah, absolutely. I got my first computer in early '99 and there was definitely a need at that time. I had the option of a built-in Zip 100 or a CD-RW as the second drive, I took the Zip Drive due to how awful early CD burners were.
These videos make me sad and nostalgic about those times. I owned every gadget and format available at the time, including tape drives. And I really miss them all. They never failed on me. I even had a DLT 7000 for Mastering DVD on tape to send over to DVD plants around the world for mass production. I always took proper care of my equipment and 15 years ago thought on opening a computer museum but while on a trip I had my house robbed. The thieves emptied it and even stole my car. I was left with the clothes I had and my backpack. Damn. I really miss all I collected during 40 years.
What a blast from my past. Thanks for sharing this.
I love the videos about computer-related history.
I used 3 1/2 floppy disk as a kid, but I've never heard about SyQuest and Iomega products, later on, I just started using CD's
wow, thank you for the rundown
Great video Colin! I’m really into the retro stuff right now and this was an awesome video to learn something new!
He is the only one I watch on retro computer stuff since it seems to be his own and not some donated computer.
I can still hear the sound of a Syquest 44mb spinning up and mounting, and the sound of pushing the little button to spin it down before pulling the lever to eject it. Very tactile format :)
The Zip eject mechanism always struck me as slightly violent. They came out so suddenly that I was constantly surprised they didn't shoot across the room.
Although Iomega's Zip/Jaz products eventually were obsoleted by CD burners and flash drives, it should be noted that Iomega made blank CDs and USB flash drives. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
Very accurate and interesting video. You did your research. I worked at Iomega for 12 years and was on the development team for the Zip drive. At the time I was managing technical support and it was our idea to put a window on the drive. It was also support data gathered from our CRM system that led to the design to be idiot proof. The Zip drive could only be plugged in one way and the setup was super simple. The manual was just a fold out cartoon. I remember during a company meeting when Kim Edwards, then CEO, announced one of the top 10 objectives for the year was to put Syquest out of business. We all thought that took a lot of balls but he did it. Since the Zip drive required less and easier support than the Bernoulli drives did, it was decided to get rid of the toll free support number and outsource support. Hence, I was laid off but not after I got a nice severance package. I also sold a lot stock that I'd purchased for $1.00 or $1.25 per share for $49 a share. I made a lot of money and a few months later the stock tanked because the market realized it was over-valued. About a year ago I tried to sell my Zip and Bernoulli drives and cartridges but got no interest so I threw them all away. They are just too big and bulky compared to USB storage and cloud storage. I heard a while back that Tony Radman, the guy who invented the Bernoulli drive, passed away in 2012. I knew him well and he was a really good human being - and brilliant. Keep up the great work on you videos.
Great little documentary. I had no idea I was interested in removable storage!
Amazing video, thanks for about that. I must to confess I had a quite different experience, I had two ZIP drives and both suffered with the "click of dead", I definitively lost a lot of data. I decided to buy a SyQuest SyJet. This unit never had an issue, and in fact, still working with a pretty old computer I have for romance. Lol. Thanks so much for the video.
My dad had an internal Sparq drive which failed, I tinkered with it in the garage later on because it was so easy to take apart, it was literally held together with clear tape for the top of the case.
Still have my SparQ drive. Only ever had 3 cartridges though, the starter and 2 blanks. I never even used it that much when it was relevant, mainly just to back up stuff. I do recall have issues with at least one of the cartridges, but its been so long I can't remember specifics. I think I got it on the tail end of it being relevant and as this video mentions, CD burners were right there within a year and way more reliable. As a side note, I also recall a buddy using Stacker to fit 40MB on a 1.44MB floppy, was about as reliable as it sounds lol.
Great work as always man love your deep dive videos
Backing up to Blu-ray discs now and eagerly awaiting the next storage medium.
Amazing mini documentary, thanks a lot, Colin! 💜
This got my wondering if my Zip and SyQuest disks will still be readable after being untouched for approximately 25 years :-)
Zip disks still are. I sometimes have cause to move data from a legacy G3 system too old to use USB jump drives to a newer machine, and I have a USB-cabled 250 Zip drive that does that work for me. (Curiously, none of my Jaz disks still work, but that could be because I have a failed mechanism.)
I had forgotten this. Thank you.
Loved this video. I remember selling these drives back when I worked for CompUSA. Thank you for the memories..
In Jan. 1997 I was 15 and obsessed with computers. My family happened to be in San Francisco and we drove by Moscone Center where I saw banners proclaiming that MacWorld Expo was happening. I quickly made a handwritten sign reading "SPARE MACWORLD PASS?" I only stood outside for 5-10 minutes before a kind woman in a business suit gave me her pass and said "tell anyone who questions you that I'm your mom!" I went in and spent a joyful day exploring the exhibit hall. Of the many memories I took away (including getting to use a 20th Anniversary Mac which was later given to Steve Wozniak as a token of appreciation!), one of my best was visiting the Iomega booth. I had previously stopped at a booth showing removable-disk drives (I suspect it was a SyQuest booth but can't be certain), and the people working that booth were utterly standoffish to me - obviously not interested in wasting their time on some random kid. By contrast, the folks at the Iomega booth *lit up* when I stopped by, and treated me a like a guest of honor. By the time I left their area, I was carrying two large bags of swag - tee-shirts, buttons, stickers, basically anything they could think to give me. Maybe they just didn't want to deal with packing all that stuff up (this was the last day of the show), but they made me feel so special, and I never forgot it. I remained a loyal Iomega fan from that day forward, even after a SCSI Zip drive 'click of death' nuked a big term paper a couple years later. Thanks for this video, it really bought back some vivid memories I haven't thought of in years!
I love your videos! I'm 39 and they take me back.
Fantastic video, thank you!
I rem back in the day i had a Zip SCSI Drive i used to back up my music productions and samples . Was awesome . Hadnt thought about this stuff in Years . Thanks for the refresher mate . Cheers
Thanx. Fantastic episode
Great episode - it's like a time travel👍🏽
Not technically a reason for syquest's failure, but my feeling is that the timing of the ZIP and the IMAC made the Zip disks REALLY popular for imac users. It almost felt like a forgone conclusion back in the days of the first Imacs. You'd either buy a Zip drive, or an LS 120 drive with your new imac
They were also killed by horrible reliability issues. I only had a couple of the 1gb discs and they both developed unrecoverable corrupted sectors that lost or damaged files, with minimal use, primarily as backup.
As a person who is fairly obsessed with computers I’m surprised how many of these formats and sizes I’d never heard of.
Great video. This was the big format war when I was just getting into computers. I had a Syqest 88c on my first computer, a Mac IIsi. We used them as an external hard drive. The impact of the first Zip disks on the market was massive. Equally as impactful as FireWire Drives years later.
This brings back memories. When I first started desktop publishing we depended on Zip disks. Good video.
A year later, I understand the thumbnails reference. A Tribe Called Quest reference, I love it!
That was an awesome video.
I picked up a Syquest external drive and a couple of disk for $10 total at a swampmeet a year ago. I remembered using that a while back and that brings back memories of the good old days of floppies and zip disks.
I remember when the Zip drives killed floppies because of their increased capacity, and than later the USB flash drive killed the Zip drive because of capacity and the fact that no other hardware was needed because the computers started coming with USB ports.
What a blast from the past! I was amazed to see a PLI logo early in the vid; I sold a lot of that brand back in the early days of Mac. I also both sold and used a lot of Syquest 44s & 88s, 100 MB Zips and 1 GB Jaz drives and disks. I still have both drives and disks for Syquest 44s, Zip 100s and Jaz 1GBs. The Zips were my favorites for cheap, convenient transfers, but the Syquest and Jaz were a lot more usable for active working storage due to their speed.
Great video. Back in the 90's, I had a SyQuest EZ 135 drive, a Zip drive, and an Orb drive. I didn't realize how quickly SyQuest went out of business.
By late 2000, I had purchased a CD burner. CD-R and CD-RW discs were cheap. CD burners definitely killed the types of removable media featured in the video.
By 2004, I had purchased a DVD burner, and started buying USB flash drives.
For the last decade, USB flash drives and the small 2.5" portable hard drives (powered by entirely USB) have been my choice of removable media. I currently use a 2TB 2.5" USB 3.0 hard drive for offline backups. It gets stored in a fire safe.
I still have my Syquest EZ drive backup drive and some cartridges. It was a great way to save audio files and mix info from ProTools. Those were the days when you recorded to SCSI drives that were super expensive for massive (for then) storage. When the ZIP drive came on the market I picked that up as well. It's stored in the same briefcase so they co-exist but I haven't used either for over a decade. Then I bought a Syjet ... Thank goodness for flash drives, CD and DVD for backup storage. And of course don't forget the Colorado Tape Backup System that were for sale during the this era.
I never had heard of SyQuest, but I remember my dad using Zip Disk all of the time.
I had an EZ135 while everyone else had a Zip drive, and while exchanging data might have seemed like an issue, we all got used to carrying our parallel port drives around. The real problem was reliability. I’ll never forget my first EZ135 disk failing within the first few months and losing everything on it. I ditched the drive at goodwill.
I worked in a printing company with Desk Top Publishing. Setup was a Mac IIcx and a Syquest drive. Loved it. Very productive workstation.
Syquest was awesome at the time. Among Mac users, in my area at least, the EZ 135 was extremely popular. I still have a load of disks and my drives. While they didn't touch the numbers of the ZIP disk they were faster and cooler.
You are making me miss my zip drive! I had one back in 1994-95 era. So nice to put MS Office 95 on a zip cartridge from over 60 floppies!
I was so happy to watch this video because I was a Apple computer use in the 1990s and used some of these formats. It was always confusing as to why there were so many. Now I know. I still have a 100meg Zip drive but only in storage.
Is that a "A Tribe Called Quest" pun I detect in the thumbnail!? * *nod of approval* *
thank you for the tribe called quest reference in the title
great work
When I was in my early college years, learning Photoshop 4.0, we had to use SyQuest disks for our work because nothing else at the time was big enough to store our Photoshop files.
WOW I loved this video, I used a few of these formats over the years. Mainly the Iomega ZIP and Jazz. I used Iomega Ditto tape storage at a job I had back in the late 90's.
Thanks for reminding me of the one piece of computer equipment I'd gladly take a sledgehammer to. Outrageously expensive discs, data failures and a whole lot I've forgotten about. And the failures happened in pretty well in a lab setting. God I hate those damn things, a frustrating nuisance from the start.
These things were magical, I worked for an ad agency and we used to rush these Syquest in the newspaper and it was amazing for the time. The Syquests were gold
Oh, the memories and feels this brought back.
I was in middle/high school from 2005 to 2011, and the ten or so computers we had were 90s eMachines that all had floppy drives and ZIP drives. I very quickly lost count of how many times I had to go fish out peoples' floppies they had mistakenly shoved into the ZIP slot and gotten stuck.
You forgot to talk about how troublesome SyQuest 44MB and 88MB carts were to mount. All the time I spent trying to get those things to mount and the ridiculously slow write speeds... SyQuest stole many precious hours of my life. Horrible days, those were.
I remember the Zip Disk. It was a dream to be able to store so much data for a so reasonable price. I loved the Zip Disk! I very nice video, as a always. Thanks!
When I studied computer science at SFSU we used Syquest 270 cartridges for our homework, projects and assignments.
They were very expensive. The consolation being that we didn't need to buy overpriced textbooks that our fellow students in other fields did.
By the time I graduated hard drives had fallen in price and increased in capacity. And Zip drives were stupid cheap.
So I sold my Syquest carts on Craigslist.
Zip was slower and less reliable, but it was so much cheaper!
I paid $99 for the drive and the cartridges were easily found for $10 more or less.
This was in that golden era of computer stores in the Bay Area. There was a publication "Computer Currents", in which dozens of mom and pop computer stores were selling dirt cheap IBM compatibles, components and peripherals.
The catch here was that the really cheap stuff was certainly grey box or sketchy origin.
You could not get a warranty claim on these things!
But being a broke college student I didn't care.
I remember SyQuest drives along with Bernoulli drives because they were some of the only formats that met department of energy security requirements, so we had multi-boot Macs that let you move from unclassified to classified work just by shutting down and swapping the boot drive. That said, the 'Bernoulli Crunch' was always a horrible thing to hear.
I was working at a store called Computer City (owned by Tandy) as a Upgrade Technician in 1997. Despite the high price we sold around 3 Syjet 1.5GB models a week and were always being asked if the higher capacity version had come out yet. We were told by sales reps that a 3GB model was coming but never did.
Man, I hardly ever hear anyone mention Computer City anymore. We had one in my remote city. We had just gotten a Best Buy, then a CompUSA, then Computer City. It was an embarrassment of riches for a little while. CC vanished before very long, but I have fond memories of swooning over all the pretty cloud-adorned boxes in the Win 95 days, the foreign but intriguing New OS X display up front and center, and the huge end-cap displays of Creative Labs products.
Comp USA bought out Computer City in 97ish.
Oh my. Thats the greatest pun I've seen in a youtube thumbnail. Good on ya Colin.
My dad installed an internal SparQ drive on the family computer shortly after they were released. Finally - a full 1 GB drive I could dedicate to games! Even with a cartridge dedicated only to games, I believe we only ever used 3 of the 5-pack of cartridges that were initially purchased with the drive, so I'm not surprised that iOmega wasn't able to recoup their costs with cartridge sales alone.
If I'm not mistaken the drive died around a year after we bought it, and we bought and added a larger hard drive to replace it.
Working at a printing pre-press shop at the time I ran into almost all of these media types. We had to be able to receive whatever the customer was sending. Mostly Zip disks, Jaz becoming more prevalent later as image sizes increased. Very few SyQuest 44/88 disks, but we had the drive around. Eventually was almost entirely CD based. Very cheap and almost every machine came with a drive preinstalled.
I had friends who designed rave fliers in 91-92 and I remember they were always complaining about how hard it was to get their Syquest discs back from service bureaus. Theywere a significant investment for a freelancer in those days and completely indispensable, there was no other way to get 44MB of data to a printer.
Remember losing all the data with zip drive click of death.
These discs were so hard to erase and burn properly. I hated them with every fiber of my body.
"A Drive Called SyQuest" I see what you did there. Well played
Another awesome video.
I remember using IOMEGA Zip drives. I had an external one but realized that no computers other than mine had it so I'd have to carry it everywhere I went.
It didn't see much use and was retired when 2009 came and I got an iMac with some USB Flash Drives.
Since then I've been using external SSDs for fast storage and transfers in conjunction with SyncThing to sync files between my systems.
Good times.
Cool drive! I've been working on videos on old data storage mediums, always interesting to learn about more.
How about those gigantic Bernoulli cartridges? 😎
Excellent report! I was thinking "will he mention Castlewood?". And yes, he did! :-)