Think Retro: Who else kinda misses their Zip disks?<article>
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These days, of course, the idea that 100MB is “a lot of data” is pretty preposterous. Shoot H.264 video at 1080p and 60fps for four seconds, such as on an iPhone 6, and you’ve generated a hundred megs of data.</p><p>
A little over 20 years ago, however, when Iomega introduced the original 100MB Zip disk, that was staggeringly huge for a removable disk. The wildly more common 3.5-inch floppies held 1.4MB. For context, the entry-level PowerBook 150, introduced in the same year, had a 120MB hard disk, and the base configurations of even 1994’s
server Macs came with hard disks that were only five times the capacity of the Zip disk.</p><p>
The humble Zip disk, then, was a kind of de facto successor to the ubiquitous high-density 3.5-inch floppy. You had to buy a special drive to mount it in, because although they had about the same footprint as a regular floppy disk, they were much thicker. In fact, Zip disks had a lovely chunky, seemingly hugely robust quality compared to normal floppies.</p><p class="jumpTag"><a href="/article/2875893/think-retro-who-else-kinda-misses-zip-disks.html#jump">To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here[/url]</p></section></article>
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Think Retro: Who else kinda misses their Zip disks?
