[mingus88]

I worked in a university computer lab in the late 90s and these drives were very popular. Burning a CD was not a similar solution.

People needed primary portable storage and Zip drives were amazing solutions before USB drives.

The school gave each student just 15MB of storage for their email account, which was also their homedir storage for any other school project

But the labs had at least a few stations with Zip drives

The article quotes a pretty low failure rate overall but I suspect college students were seeing these fail a lot more because they just threw the disks in their bags and walked around to class all day. Having to deal with someone whose only copy of their work was on one of these triggers a traumatic response in me.

[jerf]

Those were exactly the people I was thinking of when I said it didn't bring enough value. Yes, plenty of students saw a Zip drive bay in their school computers and bought it on the theory that if it was there the schools must know what they were doing and it was a "requirement" of one sort or another. It didn't occur to them that the Zip drives were there because Iomega probably bought their way in, rather than because they were actually a vital tool.

And students may have gotten some minimal, non-zero utility from it, but almost everything they would have been doing at the time would have fit on a floppy disk just fine. Maybe two. The Zip drive was slightly more convenient... for about $150 more. Aroud $300 inflation-adjusted.

That's not $300's worth of value, and especially not $300's worth of value for a college student. I can manage a couple of floppies and "that one time I had a really big project" for $300 as a college student.

Yes, I'm sure you have a story of that one guy who had an 80MB project that fit no other way. But think of all the people who had 96% empty drives because all their documents were tiny that don't come to mind.

You will note that there was no cohort of people coming out of college demanding Zip drives everywhere else in the world after them, because I doubt very many of your students came away with a strongly positive impression of the Zip drive, even for those for whom it worked perfectly.

[orev]

Zip drives arrived at exactly the same time as digital art, the web, and most importantly Macromedia Flash. Maybe the CS people with a few source code files didn’t fully use the space, but the art kids certainly did.

There simply was no other option at the time than Zip drives. Others did not strike the right balance of price, capacity, responsiveness, etc. Maybe Iomega paid to get them installed, I don’t know, but there really was no other option so I can easily see schools buying them just because they needed a solution.

USB thumb drives started appearing not long after, and they didn’t suffer from the click of death, so those became the preferred media by the time those people graduated school.