MUSEUM OF THE FALLEN
Dominance is not eternal.
The Wall/ Lost Technology/ The Zip Disk
An Iomega 100 MB Zip disk, the teal-and-grey removable storage cartridge of the late 1990s.

Bobulous, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0

Lost Technology

The Zip Disk

1994 CE 2010 CE

The chunky 100 MB disk that bridged the floppy and the CD-R, then choked on the Click of Death.

Born
1994 CE
Died
2010 CE
Lived
16 years
Dead for
16 yrs
At its peak
Tens of millions of Zip drives sold in the late 1990s
Cause of death
Replaced
Replaced by
Recordable CDs and USB flash drives
The Obituary

Iomega’s Zip drive, introduced in 1994, answered a real problem: the 1.44 MB floppy was too small for the growing files of the 1990s. A Zip disk held 100 MB, later 250 and 750 MB, in a cartridge slightly thicker than a floppy, and it became a favourite for design studios and home backups. Reliability hurt it; the “Click of Death” failure could destroy a disk and the drive together. Cheap recordable CDs and then USB flash drives offered more capacity for less money, and Iomega wound the product down by around 2010.

Worth remembering

  • A single Zip disk held 100 MB, about 70 times a standard floppy, later 250 MB and 750 MB.
  • The dreaded 'Click of Death' could wreck both the disk and the drive that read it.

Sources

  1. Iomega introduced the Zip drive in 1994 with 100 MB removable disks Wikipedia
  2. Zip drives suffered the 'Click of Death' failure mode and were superseded by CD-R and USB Wikipedia

A graveyard tradition: leave a stone to show you came, and remembered.

Buried nearby
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Bethlehem Steel
1857 CE — 2003 CE
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Blockbuster
1985 CE — 2010 CE
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Enron
1985 CE — 2001 CE
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