Iomega Clik: Little Disk, Huge Failure
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- Опубликовано: 30 сен 2024
- Throughout the 1990s, Iomega was the darling of the storage industry with its various, successful disk formats. But while technology was rapidly changing at the end of the decade, the company stuck to what it knew best with its Clik/PocketZip disk -- which ultimately would lead to its downfall.
Sources:
"One Size Stores All," PC Magazine, March 9, 1999.
PocketZip disk photo: www.fileformat...
"Zip Drive Death Click Is for Real," PC World, May 1998.
"Watchdog," Maximum PC, July 2001.
HipZip packaging photo: / iomega-fotoshow-hipzip...
"Ultimate MP3 Showdown," Maximum PC, March 2001.
Agfa ePhoto CL30 Clik photo: www.journaldul...
PocketZip USB drive box photo: / 1526220163917283329
"Iomega Announces New 100MB PocketZip Drive," web.archive.or...
"More Room to Store," PC Magazine, January 19, 1999.
"Iomega's 10GB Peerless Drive System," Maximum PC, August 2001.
"Personal Storage," PC Magazine, March 21, 2000.
"Iomega takes Q2 drubbing, plans layoffs," Computerworld, www.computerwo...
"First Looks," PC Magazine, March 2008.
"EMC to acquire Iomega," www.dell.com/e...
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The click of death was like a hardware virus. Damage a disk by a faulty drive, put that disk into another drive, damage that drive and so on. Zip drives had a massive failure rate. Reliability was low. Cost was high.
I worked for a household name PC manufacturer in those days. If a customer called in and you could see there was an internal iomega drive on the specification of their computer, you pretty much knew what they were calling about before they said anything.
The fact that it could be “transmitted” via hardware was kind of horrifying at the time.
IMO, it wasn't actually that unreliable. It's just that the carnage from a damaged disk could be really wide-spread. It was highly "contagious." Other than that, the drives and media were actually pretty reliable.
The main issue is that the heads were so small -- which they had to be, at those capacities. A physically deformed disk could snag the heads and damage them, which could cause damage to any other disks inserted into that drive, and so on and so forth. This didn't happen in floppy drives because the heads were so chonky and stout, but any other dense-capacity format would've likely had similar problems. The only way to prevent that would be to use a physical medium that wasn't prone to deformation, like Jaz, but that made the Jaz format considerably more expensive. (Albeit, while also allowing it to store quite a bit more.)
I agree with Nick. The drives were actually fairly reliable, it's the fact that they destroyed the media once they did go bad that caught everyone's attention. It's interesting you mention the internal drive because I've never had an internal drive get the click of death, while the portal ones were less reliable for me (and then companies in worked at, where almost every computer had a drive). I had an internal zip drive that still worked up until a couple years ago before I got rid of it in all my older zip disks after I archived them.
I had a SCSI Zip Drive that worked fine for a while, until the dreaded “click of death” happened. The drive heads and the disk that it was reading were all destroyed. I later got an internal Zip Drive that never had any problems.
I worked at a small firm with 6 PCs and a win2000 server and the zip drive filled the space between floppy and tape backups perfectly, back when writing CDs for backup was quite new, and time consuming!
The format was ideal for the times even if the technology was unreliable - that said we had 3 zip drives and a whole bunch of zip disks and never had a single problem in the year or two I remember using them almost exclusively for important files. I had no idea about the click of death until later.
Little disk, huge flop.
No you didn't.
@@deadsetmassascared Couldn't resist.
The true floppy disk
Same as yours?
"she"
While it was a shame that Iomega as a company failed. The reliability issues the Zip and Jaz drives had really hurt their credibility with both individuals and companies. I can still remember the band KMFDM lost an entire album during recording in the late 90s as the Jaz drive they were using messed up multiple disks of recordings.
Brilliantly obscure fact :) i like it!
Yep, I bought a Zip drive and I don't think I had a single disk that stood up to any use. They all failed hard and quickly. I had a SuperDisk drive and that thing was awesome. 120mb of data and I could read regular floppies in it as well.
@@SmallSpoonBrigade Superdisk was a significant improvement. I used the Zip 100 for backups, and it was a big hassle to use it, plug it into printer port. Didn't have any fail though.
I was honored with the CoD on both my personal Jaz and Zip drives, in rather close order. Never considered buying Iomega again.
I'm fortunate enough to remember iomega back in their prime. I live in Roy Utah, less than a block away from their former world headquarters. My friend in elementary his mother worked doing product manuals in the early 90s up until the Lenovo acquisition. This device and the USB cd burner that failed to gain popularity were why they were losing income like crazy. I remember testing out new hardware and software from around 1995 all the way to 2002.. this is also where I got to play marathon 2 for the very first time.. in the waiting room of their testing facility after school in 1996..
@@parkman29 why not? Utah has its own 'silicon slopes' area to the south that have divisions of Oracle, Adobe, SanDisk, etc.. 3 million people live in the ogden-salt lake-provo metro area. I remember when fields separated the metro areas, now they're talking 5-7 lane freeway heading north to Ogden in the next couple of years.
@@parkman29 I worked for their service desk/call center in the early 2000s in Indianapolis, and yes, headquarters was in Roy, Utah. Getting a call from the 801 area code was frightening, since it could be one of the big guns. Sadly we had to shut down because another client of ours, HTC, was consolidating call centers, and took their customer support desk and merged it with their service desk, leaving us with not enough capacity to keep a call center going.
My favorite story was one we heard often, with a twist. Iomega was selling portable hard drives, and everyone who had a hard drive fail seemed to have the same story. "We want data recovery!!!" We of course would respond, "Did you back up your data?" "Yes!" "Then where is it?" "Your drive was our backup!" "If you didn't have another copy somewhere else, you didn't have a backup." This of course would trigger the response that the user agreement doesn't include data recovery, and you should always have a backup, too bad, so sad, etc. (We didn't say that, but that's unfortunately what most customers heard.) Data recovery was some insanely small add=-on amount like $10 more at purchase, a true bargain.
I was working in conflict resolution at the time, and I had heard hundreds of sob stories about lost data and not being able to afford data recovery. A guy came in, considered our policy BS, and got fed up. He sent us a picture of his drive with a shotgun blast through the center for effect (it was probably drilled first) and the message, "Fixed it!" Yes, no more click of death with that drive, that's for sure.
loosing ?
I also worked in Iomega documentation and know your friend’s mother very well.
@@parkman29 I worked there!!!
Great video, but this immediately makes me think of IBM/Hitachi Microdrive. Hard drives the size of CompactFlash-II cards? It did in fact exist.
I worked at Iomega in the mid 90's. Zip and Jaz. They laid us off and sent everything to Malaysia long before Clik.
I was all in on everything Iomega back in the day. I'm still waiting for my mail-in rebate on my zip drive.
Maybe I was too young or not paying attention, it felt like Iomega blew up and was everywhere. If you had a Mac, you had at least one Iomega drive.
Oh man I had one of these (PCMCIA). It was mostly useless because nobody else had one and I didn't want to buy another one just for carrying around for desktops.
Yeah, to make them useful you had to buy 2, making them silly expensive.
In 1999 or maybe 2000, iomega was handing out the dev kits like candy in an attempt to get OEMs to adopt the format. I worked for a digital picture frame company (Digi-Frame, second picture frame on the US market after Sony! :)) in this era and remember hooking the devkit (basically a bare version of the PCMCIA drive) up to one of our firmware dev boards, tweaking the access timing in my filesystem code to get it to work, and saying "Welp... it works... now what? It's like being the first guy to own a video phone - until everyone adopts it, who cares?"
The idea that you'd release a new product named after your current product's biggest flaw still baffles me.
My first mp3 player was an Iomega Hipzip, which used the Clik disks. My prevailing feelings were 40mb not feeling big enough, and the disks not being very reliable. I originally thought 40mb per disk would work out better than having fixed solid state 64 or 128mb, but it just ended up breaking within like 1.5 years until I got a NetMD player instead.
I had one too, but I didn't get full use out of it because I was pirating on 56K dial up and I didn't have enough CDs to encode (most of my music collection was on cassette, and I had only begrudgingly began to buy CDs because music shops stopped stocking cassettes). I liked it because the storage per MB was cheaper than all the other MP3 players at the time where you had to buy RAM sticks or whatever for them. Of course when I ripped CDs I ended up doing it at super high-quality so I couldn't get the whole CD on a disc. I didn't really know what I was doing, nor did I have a lot of money to buy a lot of disks, despite them being cheaper.
I was actually working at RadioShack at the time and when they discontinued the discs they sold them for dirt cheap, but for whatever reason I didn't buy them.
I really liked the format in theory, but I wasn't quite a big enough for the music person at that time to have a collection to take advantage, and little factors like that blocked my motivation. I never used mine enough to have one fail.
A few years later, in college, I got a first gen iPod shuffle (I paid for the one with the higher storage) and listened to streaming internet radio on Pandora, and any song that I thought was interesting, would immediately pirate (including possibly all the music of that band). I still had the hip zip, and I felt a quiet regret that it never got much use, after I had made such a big deal to my parents that one Christmas that was the thing that I wanted most.
I got a lot of use out of that first gen shuffle, later upgrading to a fourth gen shuffle, and finally a fourth gen nano. But I have both the nano and the shuffle, I made the shuffle my dedicated workout music player and my nano for general use.
In reliability the HipZip was the Land Rover among mp3 players
Around that time my parents let it slip that they were planning on getting me some similar mp3 player for my birthday. Immediately I was like, "Oh, no, please don't." and then I had to explain that mp3 players "aren't ready yet" and why. That was a weird conversation because I really wanted an mp3 player, just not any of the ones that existed at the time.
@@mackster85 Mechanically, the disks and player should have broken 15 different ways.
I worked for Best Buy in the late 90s. When I think back on how insanely expensive storage was back then, it's a astounding. It seemed like every other week we were getting some new type of storage in stock. We'd learn about it, sell some got insane prices, then most would disappear.
Best Buy
Cheap people kept using film, we already did flash memory !
Why sell crap, Big Box crap stores !
@@lucasRem-ku6eb Big box stores sold exactly what customers wanted to buy back then.
Actually, our last disk format wasn't Clik, but REV. We got a little traction there - even being the storage media for some Grass Valley professional cameras, but it just wasn't enough. We were acquired by EMC because our NAS drives filled a niche to them for SMB (for EMC "Small Business" meant anything less than like 20,000 employees). Our SMB NAS drives were targeted to *real* small businesses. That part of us was sold to Lenovo (where I am now, as the last person remaining from the Iomega acquisition).
5:51 - 30$ for 2 disks, 50$ for 3? So, basically it was cheaper to get 2 disk packs?
I remember when *everyone* in college had some form of Iomega drive (Zip, Jazz, etc), but i never saw a Click
I love watching your videos and learning about the history of tech in an interesting and informative way, looking forward to the next one!
Plus a friendly voice.
For pre SD cards age mini PCs with a spare PCMCIA slot, the Click drive was ABSOLUTELY awesome! Zero footprint expandable storage that you Click to swap out 40MB at a time. Loved these for my IBM PC110 and early Toshiba Librettos back the day when solid state 32MB CF cards cost a small fortune!
lol "Clik" omg that's the name they picked after the "click of death" with the 100MB zip drives .... what was their marketing team thinking!!!! 🤦♂🤦♂
Thanks for the video.
Iomega perfected the click of death and then releases a product called clik.
A friend and I had zip drives and both had the click of death to the point my friend gave it the fist of doom and that ended the click problem.
I helped Iomega launch the clik! and associated devices in the UK...we worked on the radio side of things. At the time, it was a fun and quite useable option. I still have the player somewhere!
I never had a Clik drive but the ZipCD brought back some memories, it was the first CD burner I owned. I found a good deal on one back in 2000 and it came with Mac software (probably Toast), which not all drives did back then, so I got it to use with my Powerbook G3. It served me well for a few years but eventually died and was replaced by a DVD burner.
Iomega made so many funny formats. I always loved the Jaz drives, and so when I built my new PC this last October I built in the drive of the Jaz's successor: the Rev. It's wonderfully infuriating in that it shows as a CD drive in Windows so it'll only let you "burn" things to this hard drive in UDF format. It holds 35GB a disk and I have yet to find a reason for having it.
I have an old crt tv for no rational reason, but I enjoy the vintage tube technology somehow and watch 80ties tv series on it.
I put a rather new BD-RE slot-in drive in a build. To this day I don't know what I was thinking there. I have maybe burnt three audio CDs with it.
I have a SCSI JAZ for my Akai S6000 sampler, perfect companion.
@@dglcomputers1498 Besides the name, any SCSI-to-SD or SCSI-to-CF adapter would be a far better match. The era of rotating media is just over - HDDs currently fight for their lives, and the rest is basically niché.
The REV drive could be written to normally, but it needed the IomegaWare driver to do that. Otherwise, Windows just saw it as an optical drive.
419 dollars for 128 Megabytes!
Today you can bud several Terabytes for the same price.
Iomega also made a USB dock that you could slide the PCMCIA Clik drive into. This was the most versatile solution. I used one of these docks in my video on Clik disks. ruclips.net/video/HJSd3D39wyk/видео.html
Ah Iomega, trying to find a spot in the market...
Sometimes it worked, with the ZIP they had a lovely market. For a while it was a pretty good way to store 100Mbyte or 250Mbyte of data. You could fit whole games on there... multiple graphical projects!
But this, this was pushing it too hard.
and when the drive failed and damaged your disk, you lost it all, and back then that was a lot of data to lose. Because the disks were so expensive, you likely had no second copy. If you did, you had no second drive. Because the drives were expensive, no one else you knew likely had a drive either, but if they did, they didn't want you putting a disk in their drive which would likely damage their drive too!
There was nothing else like it though; the convenience of a floppy but with a useful capacity. Sure you could burn a CD but it was time consuming and one-way, sure you could use a tape drive but not every small office had the budget for that either. As a portable, removable storage format it was a game changer and nothing really did the same job until USB storage came along. If Zip had been technically flawless, the company might still be around today.
Your videos are always a walk down memory lane. I recall liking these Clik discs when they came out. I bought the PCMCIA adapter and had a music player that used them. I too, eventually grew weary of the 40MB limit as I could barely fit a whole album on a single disk and moved onto recordable CD and flash memory media.
Ah yes, PCMCIA, back when geeks got to actually name stuff and everything didn't need to be pronounceable as an acronym. I always loved that People Can't Memorized Computer Industry Acronyms was an acceptable choice that lasted as long as it did. OTOH, Technology Without An Interesting Name, was pronounceable and did wind up lasting longer.
Iomega tried to market a Peerless Drive as a N64 accessory. Whether they actually had a Nintendo 64 compatible drive or not is anyone's guess. I lean towards it being a concept for marketing purposes but it was the last time I remember Iomega trying to sell a consumer digital storage medium as a must have accessory.
If you look closely at the pictures of the CES display, it was literally just a Peerless Drive shoved into the N64's cartridge slot. It's extremely likely that no serious development for it happened and they just had it there as a visualization of the Peerless Drive's touted portability and flexibility.
They got the click of death! Those disks were just redundant especially when Compact Flash and Smart Media were just more reliable and had no moving parts. Also Iomega should’ve embraced flash memory cards in the early 2000s, they would’ve still been in business!
Man I remember when these things were brandn ew and at the time? 'Hey what if they made these things hold more? And made a dedicated walkman-like player for them so yo ucould play MP3's?' At the time wondered why albums weren't released on these thigns along with multi-media goodies. Then again given what it is there was no way to prevent re-writing so literally the RIAA was never going t ogo for it.
Then I saw the reader wasn't usb and 'transfer speeds are gonna be TERRIBLE.' And I was right. the older connectiosn are fine for floppies because storage space is so small, but for this you needed USB.
These 'right at the tail end of magnetic/pre solid state' formats are danged interesting.
I disagree with the premise that magnetic media was dead. TO THIS DAY, magnetic media blows away solid state in terms of bytes per dollar. What they failed to do, is update the magnetic media and read/write heads. 2" magnetic disks held many gigabytes in 2000. Due to the nature of sealed drives vs open drives, you could never achieve hard drive levels of data storage, but 1/2 would be reasonable. The main issue is hard drives are sealed in clean rooms and the heads "fly" over the disk extremely close to the disks. While this would not be possible in a portable removable drive, it could have been MUCH, MUCH better than 40MB.
And the competition at the time was a portable hard disk of some kind, either as mentioned in the video build into an audio player or as I bought at the time , or perhaps slightly later, a battery powered hard drive with a media reader built in. It’s floppies that died. Why bother when hard drives are smaller and hold more data.
@@francesconicoletti2547 "Portable" hard disks have their limitations. The heads in a hard disk fly super close to the disk surface. They are extremely susceptible to vibration or shock. Simply placing one down on a desk while it is spinning can kill a hard disk. They aren't exactly power friendly either.
I remember only finding out about the Zip disk "click of death" while searching for this on the internet. 😆
I like that you covered that, I bet I wasn't the only one who typed iomega click into the search engine instead of clic.
I can still hear that noise. Bad times.
I worked in a company that heavily used Iomega's last unique product - the Rev removable hard disk cartridge system. Interesting concept, we used them to replace SCSI tape drives for customer backups; when they went off the market anyone with broadband was convinced to move to a remote backup solution and the rest had to faff around with USB hard drives that were less reliable and would randomly change drive letter etc.
I don’t know… plenty of small businesses used LTO tape drives during that era. Much more reliable.
Why on earth did they name it that when their own Zip drive was notorious for its “Click of Death” problem?
I had a PCMCIA version of one of these. I intended to use it as a backup and file exchange system with my ThinkPad I had at the time, but I ended up never using it. Performance was decent though.
I clearly remember seeing an ad for these in Computer Shopper back in the day when it was branded, Clik, and I actually thought it was kind of cool, as in high school I was taking Computer Network Tech classes, and actually carried my 100MB Parallel Zip Drive in my bag with me to class, along with 4 disk, as I got tired of dealing with floppies, and the desktop Gateway computers we used in class where basically ours till the HDD's got reformatted at the end of the school year, plus my school was one of the few places in my county that had internet faster than 56K dialup, and I would download whatever I needed/wanted when we had free time in class.
Having said that, after having 2 Zip drives fail on me, after I got out of school with my first full time job, I moved onto carrying 64MB, 128MB, and 256MB CF cards in my bag, along with a USB 1.1(later USB 2.0) CF card reader to download what I needed at work, as most of my area was still stuck on 56K dialup till mid 2008. I still have the CF cards along with the reader, and they still work lol!
I still have several of these, and they still work! I had the Agfa digital camera that used these as their storage medium. Ah, good times! 🙂
The Minolta Dimage 5 was my first good digital camera. only 3.3 megapixels, but the 7 element GT lens was its strong point! It captured great photos. The 7x optical zoom was fantastic! It was called a "Prosumer" Digital camera. 35-250mm (equivalent)
After Click!/Pocket Zip failed PC World here in the UK started selling drives & disks off cheap & as my GF & me were using Hand Held PC’s at the time we bought PCMCIA drives, partly because they were fine for the sizes of data we needed to swap but also partly because we recognised how over engineered they were for the job & thought it was funny.
The HipZip brings back a lot of memories. I hated it. But it was my first MP3 player, and I won it in a raffle, the first and last time I've ever won something. The storage medium was too expensive for the time and yes, it held very few MP3 files. It was a good concept since some MP3 players were using physical hard drives that could fail with shock. It was just very limited in capacity and too expensive to keep up with. The batteries weren't even replaceable.
A vintage Maxtor box is certainly a good way to start the video 🙂I always found it funny that Iomega dared name their new drives Clik! after the click-of-death fiasco on the ZIP drives...
As 'bad' as those floppy cameras were, you have to consider that for the film you didn't know what you had until you got the film developed. Floppy-based cameras allowed you to actually look at your pictures and determine what you had on the fly. Having a stack of floppies and a couple of batteries might seem terrible in the age of smartphones, but at the time it was still acceptable, especially for businesses.
Makes sense, yes - like an Estate Agent who needed decent photos of a property - they could instantly see what they are getting, and not have the hassle of finding a photo lab.
@@museonfilm8919 my freight company used them for freight damage claims. Insurance adjusters used them. I still have some old Mavicas and they still work. Not bad for tech that's close to a quarter century old.
Bloody Hell ! I hate this brand.... Of course I got the Infamous "click of the death"... and lost some precious datas..!
I know : backup , backup and always backup ! I learn the hard way.
I still have a Zip100 drive and bunch of disks somewhere around here. Wonder if they still work.
I almost bought an SLR camera with Click! disk storage, but ended up going with a traditional 35mm SLR (itself soon supplanted by SSM storage). Technology development is a freight train.
I don't even remember these from back in the day. They probably would have done better had Iomega licensed the tech with a low royalty fee. Much like what the SD Foundation did/does. Writable CDs killed the company though, more so than flash media. Sony used mini-CDs in a lot of their earlier digital cameras. Same size, same transfer rate, MUCH cheaper. Even my Zip drive got tossed the second I discovered that UDF authoring was a thing. When you're selling a 100MB disk for $20 and the guy up the road is selling fifty 650MB CDRW discs for the same price, tough to compete.
I worked for Iomega in both Zip and Jazz drive/disk production. Cindy Lauper's lawsuit, the CD burner, and moving production over seas is what killed the company!!!
That's a shame, the CD Burner was actually pretty decent. But, given how crap the Zip disks had gotten, I can't blame people for avoiding them like the plague.
@@SmallSpoonBrigade The media used inside was flown over and warped when shipped!!! We fixed as many as we could, and then they moved manufacturing over seas. Then Iomega was robbed blind by the locals. We did it right in Roy, UT!!!
I can remember seeing these in computer magazines at the time. I also saw them in shops, but I worked in London's West End. I'd invested in Zip discs and had personally encountered the infamous "click of death" so the name of the new product raised an eyebrow! Even without the unfortunate name, though, the reliability issue with Zip had made me wary of Iomega. That aside, Clik! felt like a cool little format that nobody would want. It felt like it was intended to be a mass-market consumer product, but who was going to invest in a proprietary format?
I lived through this entire era. I had a zip drive but never went in for the Clik. My first digital camera was the awful Apple Quicktake that didn't even have removable media. My next one was an Olympus Camedia and then a Nikon D-100.
I will say though, that I totally understand the dilemma these companies (iomega and SyQuest) were facing. You create a format for removable storage, and it catches on... Selling media is practically printing money. Who'd want to give up that? And innovation actually kind of goes against that, because introducing something new, means that you phase out the old, and if the new doesn't catch on the same way, you may have killed off both the old AND the new. So you'll want to keep the popular format alive for as long as possible. The good thing is that it could give you more time to refine the new replacement product, but it could also mean that the new replacement is already outdated by the time you release it to market, which was a big risk with the rapid pace of development during the '90s.
I miss my Zip drive. I remember downloading MP3’s off Napster to a Zip drive and taking them home from U of M computer lab.
The nomad was FAR bigger, and had durability issues. The hip zip was rugged AF. I had one that I used while mountain biking. The number of times it fell onto pavement or trails was easily in the dozens, but it just kept working. I could carry a few disks with me and have music for a few hours. It fit a role that wouldn't be filled for a few years. That said, it was definitely a commercial failure. Had it been marketed as a rugged device it might have seen more market share. Mine worked flawlessly up until I just stopped using it because I stopped biking. MP3 CD's fit what I needed for in car needs, so the hip zip went into a drawer never to be used again. I have many fond memories of cycling around town with the hip zip shoved in a small saddle bag under my seat. Cake and Blur never sounded so good! :D
I only ever used Iomega's 2GB backup drive. Never did use any of the earlier products. We used the 2GB for backups of Unix systems - always with a verify read-after-write pass and mostly multi-volume. My experience was that when you used the discs for the first couple of times you usually got a clean copy (though there were new discs just out of shrink wrap that failed right away) but after that, the reliability got worse and worse - to the point where we eventually got our management to shell out on a streaming tape system from HP - which had its own problems in terms of speed, but was at least more or less reliable over the long term.
Calling your product "Clik" when you main product is known for the "Click of Death" shows that their marketing department were deaf to the public perceptions of their company.
$419 for 128 meg holy crap a few years ago ingot a free 512 meg thumb drive in the mail. It just showed up with turbo tax branding on it.
(to the tune of Devo's "Whip It")
When a floppy disk won't do, you must ZIP it!
250 megs for you, you must ZIP it!
The disks are gray and blue, you must ZIP it!
My Zip drive failed so routinely there was no way I was going to try their next product.
"Zip" drives were greath, they were (in my option) much easier to handle than Floppy Drives, I installed them into all three of my computers, plus a plug in unit.
Maybe the name was a major hurdle? Didn’t those Zip drives have an infamous c’click of death’? You don’t want to remind customers of that.
1:01 ah yes the old mp3 nuggets, with the wrongly written titles and artists because you got that file "shared" from some place, BTW that's a great song until this day!
I got my first zip-drive the other week. I find the format fascinating. It makes sense for retro computers and their needs. It's a shame that Iomega didn't stay on track with removable storage.
They did, it's just that CD burners made a lot of their benefits less useful. Once USB stick storage devices showed up, the game was pretty much over for Iomega.
I say this as a major Zip drive fan. I still have my original SCSI one bought right on release, as well as an internal ATAPI one and a USB one (I picked the other two up many years after the first). I mostly have them to recover files for any old friends, but data was still good last time I looked on my disks.
I bought a single SyQuest cart for one of the common drives we had on campus before Zip came out - it was larger in size, a bit larger in capacity, but over a hundred bucks compared to 20 for Zip blanks. :P
My roommate had a Jaz 1 GB drive as well as a Zip - that thing was really neat.
As to Zip - when it first came out, if you got the SCSI version you now had basically a slow hard disk to use for fun - the parallel port version was only useful as a backup tool; the use cases for the two models was completely different, and sadly I knew a few folks who got parallel version and screamed in jealousy when they saw how much faster the SCSI version was. :P
The world did not need a zip disk. What it needed was a new universal floppy disk standard with updated specs. By the time Zip disks came out, it was already possible to write 32megabytes to a standard floppy.
A new floppy standard could have easily hit 200MB or more with the right specifications. All they really had to do was design a smaller head standard and decrease the particle size on floppy disks.
Floppy disk technology was fundamentally unchanged since the 70s.
@@tarstarkusz ZIP basically _was_ the next-gen floppy. They were high-capacity enough to be truly useful, small enough to be portable, relatively affordable (if not "cheap"), manufactured by multiple vendors, and thus got a decent amount of traction in the marketplace.
Other than that, there were new floppy drives just about every year. Queue up the entire series of The Computer Chronicles and just watch them in sequence. Keep track of how many times you hear that a manufacturer is or will be releasing a new and improved floppy disk format.... Don't turn it into a drinking game, though. I want you to remain in good health.
It wasn't an easy sell to replace the existing installed base. There was significant skepticism even about the Sony 3.5" floppy disk, and George Morrow made several bold claims that it wouldn't catch on, because all the software was already on 5.25" disks. Then Apple used it for the Macintosh, Commodore used it in the Amiga, and IBM used it in the PS/2, and that was that.
The road was littered with one-ups on this format ... 2.88MB, and several more significant capacity bumps to 20M, 30M, 100M, 120MB, 200M ... Either 1) it was vaporware; 2) it wasn't reliable; 3) nobody had them and thus nothing was on them and thus nobody wanted to invest in a format that wasn't usable anywhere else; and/or 4) the patent holder wanted to charge excessive money per disk, which made it utterly unattractive for a consumable item.
The result was apathy to the point where the 1.44MB format languished well past its useful life, and only took the hint and disappeared when Apple finally called time-of-death, and refused to install them in new computers. At that point, CD was the dominant distribution method for retail software, and flash media was cheap enough to be ubiquitous -- at least in the 8-16MB range, where it was, in just about every way, superior to floppies.
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These days, for us retro nerds, ZIP is a godsend. At least half of my entire (sizable) retro fleet have ZIP drives installed. For systems without (good) USB mass storage support (so basically, everything up to Windows 2000), having a ZIP drive is the easiest way to share >1MB files. With SCSI, it acts like a huge, fast(er) floppy drive. No need to run any software other than generic ASPI disk support drivers, so you have everything you need from a boot floppy. Great way to get all the Windows drivers and essential updates and applications on one disk -- particularly if the CD-ROM isn't CD-R friendly.
@@nickwallette6201 But it wasn't a backwards compatible floppy disk. Plus, it wasn't an open standard like floppy disks were. Initially they were all external because there was no interface available. Most people put a hard disk on one IDE and the CD-ROM on other. The Master/Slave IDE system was fundamentally broken in the early years. There was no quicker way to kill a CD ROM drive than to set it up as a slave on your 0 IDE channel. This was eventually fixed though.
This is why it had to be backward compatible. Since you were only going to make the head smaller and use smaller particle size on the disk and possibly, though not necessarily a faster spin rate , backwards compatibility should not have been much of a problem.
What other floppy disk standards are you talking about? If you mean things like the Bernoulli drive and other drives like that, these were never positioned as a replacement for floppy. Most of those types of things were scsi devices, which almost no PCs had. They were certainly NOT low cost like floppy drives were.
The 2.88 standard was far too little and too expensive. I supported an IBM shop with a ton of Think Pads, PS2s and OS/2 all with 2.88 drives. It's not like they never went anywhere at all, but it was largely just IBM that offered machines as standard with 2.88. This was close to 10 years before the zip drive.
If you can find a USB zip drive, obviously they are a great help today for moving software from a modern machine to an old one, but so is CDRW. 99% of post 1990 retro PCs have an IDE controller. Perhaps they are useful for transferring to very old PCs which have a parallel port but no IDE, like XT and 286 class (most were still MFM or RLL) machines. Not sure if they will work with such old parallel ports though.
I disagree with your apathy comment. The 1.44 drive was still quite useful for the vast majority of people well into the 2000s. Most people were not dealing with huge data files. Even today a lot of what most people use a PC for would work fine even with a 1.44MB floppy drive. HOWEVER, I do agree it should have been upgraded with the caveat that it be backwards compatible. Once something is a standard it is VERY hard to get rid of that standard other than through backwards compatible standards. For example, despite the fact that 2.88 floppies never took off, a lot of 90s PC controllers have 2.88 support built in. I'm using a floppy-less computer right now that has a floppy controller on the motherboard and one of the options for the controller is 2.88MB.
@@tarstarkusz There was eventually the LS240, I think that was a double-size super floppy. 240MB on a floppy was huge back then.
Hi Colin, I find your videos relaxing and learning quite a bit from them. I was wondering if you would consider making a video on Lightscribe disc's and drives.
Nothing better than a retro tech video first thing in the morning!
ahhh, I know im gonna have a good Friday when I enjoy one of these videos during my lunch break :)
Love these videos, keep them coming! The advances of technology (and competition) during this period of time is so fascinating.
I was a big fan of Zip disks in their prime, but didn't find a use for the Click discs, personally.
Click of death pretty much was the end of Zip disks in my life. We used Zip disks in high school and I remember seeing the zip clik online and thinking it wouldn’t take long for flash to media to be better that 40 mb. I totally see how they came up with the idea but I can’t imagine how they figured it’d have more than 2-3 years of utility.
Besides, at the time of buying a drive and a stack of disks you could have afforded a bigger card. By 2001, CF was hitting near a $1 a megabyte.
I miss this era of technology where everyone everywhere was trying something new and in some way Innovated on something even if it failed it lived on in some way in the future.
Today everyone is just safe, Giving us the same ole same ole stuff now and companies only see how to make money instead of trying something new.
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Got to move with the times, no business is too large to fail. Kodak. Nokia. Ford?
It's hard to know what Iomega could have done differently though, once their main market dried up, what could they have moved into? USB sticks perhaps?
My dad was one of the engineers that created Click Drive... good video...
As a former user of Zip and Jaz, I loved the concept of a probably disc. Iomega's expensive, fragile as china discs were destined to fail from the start.
I bought a zip drive that had the click of death! So it was a real thing!
I had the PCMCIA card. It was amazing how they could fit an entire drive into that small envelope.
People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms
Pour one out for Iomega. Long may they be remembered.
I love the zip discs in the day and I always remember seeing the Little click discs in the catalogs and things and wondered what they would be like what they were used for.
Great video, Colin! I had a Zip drive when it came out. I loved it. Although the disks were bloody expensive!
I think if Zip or Clik had come out late 80s, early 90s, then Iomega would have been a lot more successful, and probably be still in business today.
It was too late an entrant for it to be a success sadly.
Love your videos on these retro storage formats that I read about when I was in my teens but never actually used. I'd love to see you do a video on the IBM Microdrive, which as a user of a relatively early Canon digital camera that used Compact Flash (Powershot G2 in 2002) was always attractive to me because of its greater capactiy than CF at a competitive price.
It was intended for studio use because at the time the tethering connectors weren't fast enough. They were HDD, real HDD, and wouldn't really hold up to being moved much while powered on.
It wasn't their last disk format. For a while they produced a follow-up to the Jaz cartridge hard disk called REV which used cartridges containing the spindle motor and platter and the drive which contained the heads. The short-lived Chinese hard disk maker ExcelStor was contracted to produce the cartridges. It was produced in 35GB, 70GB and 120GB versions. As the platter in the cartridge was fixed to an integrated spindle motor, REV cartridges were more robust than those used in Jaz drives. The drives themselves, however, suffered from reliability problems, and the format was discontinued after just a few years due to the falling prices of higher capacity conventional 2.5-inch hard disks.
Ugh. Lost my entire early portfolio on a JAZ.
40 MB for an MP3 player is laughable for the time.
You could fit just 10 songs or so on one disk. And at $15 a disk, you might as well just buy original CDs. Granted, you could make your own playlist of MP3s with Clik, but it's still not worth it.
I saw LGR's Video a while back, and somehow the Click of Death seemed for Iomega's downfall that never succeeded, but way ahead of it's time in favor of USB Flash Drives.
40 megs would be sufficient for taking photos in the low single-digit megapixels, but definitely not enough for a decent amount of MP3 audio. 128kbps was about a megabyte a minute, so many albums wouldn’t fit even at that bitrate.
The computer market was a booming in 1997. Storage capacity was increasing and becoming less costly. The Clik seemed like a move in the opposite direction. It wasn’t a hugely popular laptop option because a modem/network card often occupied the only card slot. I installed my first CD burner around that time. They cost a freakin’ fortune.
The only two issues with Zip drives were capacity and cost. Size was never an issue. If you have issues keeping floppy sized disks in your pocket or bag, then you need bigger pockets or bags.
Your comment about syquest reminded me that I still have a Syquest 200MB drive (sold in a PowerUser enclosure) with 2 disks. Even still work as of a couple years ago.
I was so excited when I got it for Xmas as a kid many many moons ago.
I love the coverage of obscure and failed systems and media formats. I have heard of (but never used) Zip disks, but this product is new to me. I bought my very first digital camera around 2003, and flash memory cards were solidly the standard by then.
that time around 2003 photo shops offered a copy service from memory card to CD. It was cheap and reliable.
I remember Tape Drives.. What a Pain they were!! Glad modern technology has helped us to easily forget and remain in denial about them!
The Iomega Zip & jazz discs were legendary for their failure rates
Such Bad memories!!
I loved the Clik! drive, I fully embraced it back in the mid to late 90's. "This is the future! This little disk can hold 28 3½" floppy's! That's Amazing!" and uhhhhhh..... yeah. I was the ONLY one using it. Buy hey, when the Clik! laptop drive failed, the PCMCIA card holder gave birth to the Aluma Wallet. I'm not even joking.
Wait, you really stop saying "Hey everyone It's Colin! How's it going" intro!!?? WWWHHYYYY!!!!????
For those how remembers IRC chans like #warez, storage was THE problem, we used all kind of magnetic tape secuential storage devices, then IOMEGA (but was expensive), revolution came when CDR were available but it also became too small soon, then DVDRAM....
Fast forward a few years, and CF, SmartMedia, MemoryStick, all dead now too, being taken over by SD cards. It's a shame that CF never economically got past the 16/32GB amount, it's a lot better than SD due to it's more rigid shell. Before anyone says anything, I do know about CFast, but those are extremely expensive and not very popular due to the low cost of normal SATA SSDs.
40 megabytes… LOL! My current digital 26 megapixel camera shoots RAW images, each consuming around 56-58 mb of storage… so one of these disks wouldn’t even hold a single raw photo from 2023… my how technology progresses, and also feeds back into its own loop of “needed hardware”
I had a SCSI zip drive I got from a computer company I worked for. used it with a Pro-Audio Spectrum 16 (Now, there's a throwback for you), then an Adaptec SCSI card. The drives and disks worked fine, but once CD-Rs came into existence, I switched to them and never looked back.
That clik external setup is soooo 90s.
It remind sme a lot of the external multimedia CDrom that I picked up at HSC surplus electronics.
It had a very similar docking setup. This allowed you to undock the CDrom and use it as a 'portable' CD player. Though a stiff breeze caused it to skip. Had a snazzy neoprene sleeve though
Then you clicked it into the dock and it was a CD rom for hours of Myst gaming!
(loading)
Every time I see a story about Iomega I am reminded of the Syquest/Iomega wars.
It was a rivalry like Mac/PC or Jolt/Mountain Dew. People really lined up on either side and were fanboys.
Though in hindsight my own Syquest apologetics were based on the fact that my school used them.
All the lab workstations had Syquest 270s. Each lab had ONE Iomega on the proctors machine for transfers. And you had to wait for them to virus scan them. Not sure why they thought Syquest were pristine and Iomega were some slutty STD laden media.
Iomega was slower too, but they were cheaper so they won.
I actually still have a jazz drive around somewhere with maybe 4 discs... I think I only ever used one, and I spun that up like a decade+ ago. Pretty much it was just old games (doom 1/2, quake1, and a few others)... Copied them off to my internal mirrored 800gb hard drives.
Mr Parallel Port I'd like you to meet a friend of ours Mr USB. What ...... ? Don't worry were giving you the rackets over at CNC Milling Machines. Paralell Port would eventually be put on the shelf but it is believed still does occasional buisiness with Ali Express.
We used Iomega zip disks back in the 90s in an accounting office to keep backups and transfer large files and programs.They were horrible.Unreliable,expensive and painfully slow (IDE/parallel connection). The disks had a relatively high failure rate,which made them unsuitable for critical backups,something we learned the hard way.When CD-RW became cheaper,we switched to those and we were so much happier.
I think their failure was justified.They over promised and under delivered.They did have some compatibility issues as well.I remember having a hard time whenever i moved the zip drive to other computers.
Big fan of zip and jazz but don't remember click.
Brag time - I had a sound card with an integrated SCSI port. Soundblaster? Maybe.
I also managed to acquire a SCSI zip drive to supplement the parallel one that I had that was good but slow. Using the Internet I managed to find a 50 pin to 25 pin cable layout, a cheap 50 pin cable and solder it to a generic 25 pin port. Exceeding all expectations of my knowledge and soldering skills it actually worked. Don't remember why but my achievement became soon irrelevant but I did it!