On 3/8/2018 11:39 AM, Anthony Becker wrote:
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.
All the Macs from Apple, sold with ZIP drives, probably.
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.
You know, you have a right to not like Macs, and to say so. But pardon me, you don't have a right to make up statistics. This 50% remark spoils an otherwise reasonable review of ZIP technology. This is not a request to argue Mac vs Windows; you are welcome to your opinion, I find the argument unproductive, myself.
Yea Zip technology was great the click of death issues aside.
An issue limited to a small and late run of drives. Eventually Iomega made good on many claims of bad drives and damaged disks. This is a legitimate comment, but I call it out because many retrospective articles on ZIP disk technology point to this as "proof" the entire technology was flawed.
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.
I agree with these remarks. early CD-writable drives were brand-specific and so you needed drivers for each. at some point - I don't really know the details - the drives became non-brand specific, and operating systems incorporated them. I'd be curious to know those details, another day.
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.
There were quite a number of storage technologies. But as personal computers became commodity items, part of that process included the need for storage technology to be generic and "just work". ZIP drives and disks mostly fell into that category; the Mac/MS-DOS format problem was the more difficult obstacle to that end, as you pointed out. But that was a part of the larger Apple vs Microsoft/Windows competition. Herb Johnson it's all good -- Herbert R. Johnson, New Jersey in the USA http://www.retrotechnology.com OR .net