IIRC, both windows and mac could read windows formatted Zip disks. Only Mac could read Mac formatted (though there is software for Windows that allows reading Mac disks). A reason I always wondered why anyone would use the Mac format. You cant believe how often we'd get media at work delivered on Mac formatted disks, and we PAID those people! If you pay someone, in my opinion, you should also dictate how the item is delivered. Back then the drivers to access Mac disks on Windows was always buggy and prone to crashing. So we had to buy a Mac just to be able to receive files from these people. Probably a good half of Mac sales back then were people having to buy them in order to access files from Mac users who had no idea how to save things to they could be more widely accessed. Yea Zip technology was great the click of death issues aside. They still to this day are great for retro systems with HD controllers in order to easily make backups of your system at the very least, and to transfer between systems as your collection inevitably grows. Bernouli and Syquest drives predated them but were never as widespread or good, media was also a lot larger and less portable. Zip made large portable storage affordable until burnable CDs became more widespread, reliable and cheaper. Though once CDs did, it marked the end for the dominance of the Zip drive. Another good drive and as maligned was the Cliq. 40MB in a small format that could fit into a PCMCIA slot in a laptop. great for making a quick backup of files while on the go to prevent data loss, or to get them to transfer them. On Mon, Mar 5, 2018 at 9:14 PM, Herb Johnson via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
I don’t have any of my old Zip Drives save one internal one, nor my Jaz Drive. My Zip drives would have been useless anyway as all the ones I owned were parallel port, not SCSI.
I sell SCSI external ZIP 100 drives, and parallel external ones. USB ZIP drives were not uncommon on eBay, I don't have a stock of those. Internal SCSI ZIP drives are a little less common and my stock is limited. I have stacks of IDE/PATA ZIP drives. Also disks. Contact me privately about any of these.
I'm replying publicly, because ZIP drive technology is actually a pretty good "vintage" resource. SOme people malign ZIP disks and drives. The facts are, PC's and Windows systems used them for quite a long time, you could buy ZIP disks at the office-supply stores well into the 2000's.
I don't know of much removable storage, that spans Macs and PC's, and can be connected to most Macs and most Windows systems, *and* allow files to move between them. There's Mac-format and PC-format ZIP disks, but old Macs can read either and I think Windows can read either (I forget).
Oh, my mistake, [my SE/30 memory is] not 1.5 mb, it’s 8mb. But my hard drive sounds very gummy. Where it’ll slow down and stop spinning occasionally.
Well, time to replace that drive. While you are in there, get some 4MB or 16MB SIMMS and goose up that SE/30. (you need four SIMMS of a kind.) That's a very desirable compact Mac and it's good you have it in working order. System 7 likes more than several MB of RAM. The SE/30 mobos, they need recapping soon, if they haven't been already.
Herb -- Herbert R. Johnson, New Jersey in the USA http://www.retrotechnology.com OR .net