alt.hn

4/18/2026 at 10:14:43 PM

Why Zip drives dominated the 90s, then vanished almost overnight

https://www.xda-developers.com/zip-drives-dominated-90s-vanished-almost-overnight/

by y1n0

4/18/2026 at 11:56:20 PM

Dominated? They were pretty niche. Most people just kept using floppies, or eventually CD-Rs.

by apothegm

4/19/2026 at 1:59:47 AM

I don't know what most people did. I know that the business I worked for then needed to transfer relatively large sets of files on a regular basis. We owned hundreds of zip disks.

This was after Syquest disks and before CDs. At the time we used zip disks, CD burners were still very expensive. Later, when CD burner prices came down, we switched to those. Still later, mostly FTP.

by f30e3dfed1c9

4/19/2026 at 10:12:58 AM

Fair. At the time I wasn’t working in corporate.

by apothegm

4/19/2026 at 2:53:09 AM

they were pretty dominant in a lot of sectors. AutoDesk products pre-cloud produced large files (well, they still do, but transport is no longer an issue.) -- so zip drives were pretty ubiquitous in design until CD-R.

by serf

4/18/2026 at 10:27:13 PM

Yup. Once your drive failed (which happened to most people), you never bought from them again.

by two_handfuls