Iomega Zip Drive: Elite Floppy Disks Before USB Sticks

These days, backing up your files or sharing them with others is a walk in the park. For most purposes, a cloud service will do. For sensitive or very large files, you can plug an external drive into a USB port. In the 1990s, however, things were more complicated.

Back then, most homes weren't connected to the internet, and the few that were paid by the minute to transfer a few kilobytes per second. Flash memory was reserved for premium digital cameras and, in tiny quantities, console memory cards.

IBM had standardized the 1.44MB format for lightweight, slow-spinning floppy disks with the PS/2 series. That was enough for documents and spreadsheets, but became a problem for larger file types, such as uncompressed graphical work. Software came on CDs (or many, many floppies), but CD recorders weren't affordable yet.

If you wanted to share large files between computers that...

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