cross-posted from: https://lemmit.online/post/2824472
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The original was posted on /r/nostalgia by /u/singleguy79 on 2024-05-03 04:24:44.
I just bought a drive for my retro machine
Omg I’ve heard USB sticks be called “zip drives” before. I had no idea they were something entirely their own!
I’m pretty sure my uncle started that haha. He had a Zip drive and just couldn’t let the name go when we moved everything over to usb sticks.
For real though, he’s the only person I know who calls usb sticks “Zip drives”. It’s funny to think it carried over with other folks because not many people had those things to start with.
Somewhere out there is a Zip disk full of porn I collected as a teenager.
They were a nice alternative to the Syquest and Bernoulli disks we were using at the time–inasmuch as they were cheaper and I didn’t need to worry if the person I was going to send a file to had a 44, 88, 135 or 270 MB SyQuest: almost everyone had a Zip drive.
…but the click-of-death hurt them, and the ubiquity of CDRs and USB thumb drives was the real end.
I have several working that I still use with vintage computers. Retro Macs can boot from the scsi version and it’s way faster then the PC parallel port version <3
That was how me and my friends would get around the Foolproof software on the macs in high school.
Put a bootable os 9 system folder on a zip drive, boot from it, open the Foolproof control panel in resedit, delete all the resources, reboot into regular os 9, open quake3arena, profit.
I found a USB version at the thrift last year!