I had an Iomega Zip drive, too! So cool, but the higher capacities were too expensive and the parallel adapter didn't work everywhere. I forget if there were compatible discs, not made by Iomega, that were cheaper?
I don’t know about cheaper, but Fuji, HP and photography related companies made disks.
Completely unrelated, but the SCSI versions made them pretty much plug and play with tons of hardware. There is an old Roland sampler I have made in ‘88 that uses one, and Zip disks leave floppies completely in the dust. It’s truly night and day on every level.
The rural K-8 elementary school I attended had a lab full of Mac LCIIs up through early 2000, and chose to buy a bunch of Zip drives and use them as external dedicated storage upgrades. I don’t think I ever saw anybody use them for data transfer, just storing stuff like Mario Teaches Typing and DinoPark Tycoon. Us kids were specifically instructed to never try to eject the Zip disks.
Right after I graduated, they found the budget to upgrade to blueberry iMacs. The superintendent/principal was also the only person I ever saw using a G4 Cube in the wild; that Apple salesperson must have done a hell of a job. One of the office secretaries had one of the education-market-only beige all-in-one Power Mac G3s too.
I believe sometime in the mid-2000s, they moved on to a contract with Dell like everybody else. I guess the iPad era has seen Apple regain some education market share, but they used to absolutely dominate schools.
Yes, Iomega eventually licensed disk production to a few other companies. I know for sure that Maxell and Verbatim made them, and Wikipedia says that Toshiba, Fuji, Epson and NEC also produced some.
When they were originally released, I believe the first model was SCSI-only and cost $199. Disks were $20 each and held 100MB. Eventually the price of disks dropped a bit, until they were around $11 or so in multipacks the last time I bought any.
They also had backwards compatible 250 and 750 MB drives, but I don't know how well they ever sold. I never saw either in person. I think by the time they hit the market CD-R drives and media had dropped in price so much that Zip disks weren't economical as either a backup or file-transfer media.
That and the later drives were made cheaper and click-of-death was beginning to become an issue. My 100MB SCSI drive still works and reads the old Maxell disks no problem though.
Ah, my first tech job. It was an amazing ride going from a few hundred thousand dollars to a two billion dollar company. I bailed when things started to tank.
There was a puzzle in the MIT Mystery Hunt a few years ago where teams were given a physical Zip disk (amongst other outdated tech) and had to figure out how to read its contents :)
