[m463]

Sorry, I laughed... :)

> I’ve judged prizes both pre-2020, when we were sent stacks of books, and post-2020, when everything had switched to zip drives and online databases.

Considered medium-to-high-capacity at the time of its release, Zip disks were originally launched with capacities of 100 megabytes (MB), then 250 MB, and finally 750 MB. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_drive

[sanswork]

I remember drooling over zip disks when I was a kid. By the time I had enough of my own money to buy one they were clearly not the best choice anymore but I still did for the same reason around the same time I bought a stack of old sparcstations off ebay.

[epihelix]

I briefly used Zip drives back in the day. They were amazing, when the only alternative portable media was a 3.5" floppy.

And then USB thumb drives came along, and made them obsolete pretty much overnight.

[SoftTalker]

Amazing, until you got the "click of death"

[ColdStream]

Also had a lot less worries about a random bad sector turning up with USB.

[auto]

It’s funny, I had the same experience, and my stepdad told me recently that they close to buying me one, and eventually decided to just do a full upgrade of our machine instead. I’m definitely thankful we got a brand new machine instead.

[code_duck]

I'd guess she probably means USB flash storage devices.

[xboxnolifes]

Most certainly. I used to hear people call usb drives zip drives (and thumb drives) a lot ~2 decades ago. Truthfully, I didn't even know zip drives were their own thing until this comment chain. I just though it was an older term for usb drives.

[apparent]

I've heard "gumstick drives" or even just "gumsticks" in addition to USB/thumb. Never really heard zip though, since those are/were actually a thing.

[cwnyth]

Pretty sure they mean zip files, not drives.