I made a trip to Roy, Utah to do some work with Iomega, the company that made the Zip drive. If memory serves, I worked with them on the Jaz Drive which was the follow up product. This would have been in maybe 1997. Those drives were briefly the bee’s knees but were supplanted by relatively low cost portable USB connected hard disk drives.
The disk drive industry was nuts in the 90s when I worked in the industry. Right when I started in 1990, Maxtor or Connor had just come up with a 100MB drive for $99 which was notable for being the first sub dollar per MB storage device.
I have a vague recollection of having had both, sort of. But it wasn’t a Zip drive, it was a competitor. Looking at the Wiki entry for the Zip drive and its competitors, I think what I had was the SyQuest cartridge drive. At least the name vaguely rings a bell. The company was later acquired by Iomega, the makers of the Zip drive. And I had a tape cartridge drive that I used for backups. It actually worked quite well considering the small hard drive capacities at the time. I believe that much larger, faster cartridge tape units were used – and perhaps still are – for doing mainframe backups.
Speaking of old stuff, I tend to keep computers a long time, and the immediate predecessor of my current computer was so old that it had IDE PATA drives (not SATA). When the power supply failed I was in a pickle because it turned out to be a proprietary PSU that was no longer available, and since every external HDD adapter I could find was SATA only, I despaired of being able to recover my data from the two drives on that machine. I finally found a universal PATA+SATA adapter that allowed me to recover my files.
SyQuest made a cartridge disk drive that took a rigid translucent plastic cart that was IIRC ~6" square and ~3/8" thick. Inside was a single hard ~5" platter of metal or glass with the usual oxide coating. IIRC disk capacity was 10, 20, or maybe even 40 whopping Megabytes.
They were common external drives for Macs in the early-mid 90s; less so for PCs. By “common” I mean they were the one of the few Mac-compatible choices available. They were quite expensive and so only the folks with money to burn had one for home use.
They were also commonly used to sneakernet image and “desktop publishing” (remember that?) files around in a Mac-based corporate or media company art department. One of my firms had a small Mac-based art department and Syquest was the way files got moved not only around the room, but also to / from our printing vendor and advertising agency. Yep, Fedexing Syquest carts. Just like XKCD had it: FedEx Bandwidth - What If - xkcd.com.
More reminiscences: The first PC I ever had was a cast-off from a previous employer because even then it was somewhat obsolete, but still quite useful. It was an all-in-one package in which the CRT monitor and processor were all in the same case, something like an original iMac. The processor was a 286, the OS was Windows 2.0. It was equipped with the optional hard drive, otherwise you just had two 5.25" floppies. That hard drive was 10 MB, and was referred to as a “pizza box” because that’s what it looked like – it was roughly square and about the same width and depth as the entire computer case and sat below it.
That was the computer on which I first learned to navigate Windows and how to use a mouse. Professionally, the computers I worked with all had text-based interfaces and therefore no rodents, although one of them – a DEC PDP-12 – had a graphical display that was intended for lab analytics but was great for games like Pong, Space Invaders, and Lunar Lander! To the uninitiated it might have appeared that I was collecting a decent salary for sitting around playing Lunar Lander, but my employer actually got the better deal since I’d typically average 16 to 18 hours a day at work. Going home was no fun since there was no computer there, and I had three at work!
I still have my old dot matrix printer at the bottom of my bedroom closet. I have been meaning to get rid of it. I purchased it around 2003.
It is Citizen Gsx-190. I wonder if it would work with my current Windows 11 computer. The printer only has parallel port so that would be the first issue to solve.
I forgot to mention, regarding that first 286-based PC, that it was also very heavy. It wound up in the dumpster in preparation for one of my moves. By that time I had the awesome technology of a 486-based PC rated for 25 Mhz that I had overclocked to 33 Mhz. I put in an extra fan to blow directly on it fearing that it might overheat!
Deep memory unlocked. That project didn’t come to fruition anyway.
The first successful big project that I had as an engineering project manager was the first commercial drive that was over 1 GB for Conner. We were one of two domestic suppliers of magnetic recording heads to disk drive manufacturers. I also worked on advanced development. It’s a certainty that every one of you reading this used technology that I developed (along with a large team of people, my piece was minuscule).
Well into the 90s, the bean counters actually depreciated PCs over three years as if it were capitol equipment. Now it’s like office supplies. (I probably got some of that terminology wrong but you get the idea).
The depreciation schedule for businesses is set out in a big IRS book that defines what categories of stuff may be expensed immediately or must be depreciated over 1, 3, 5, 7, or whatever years period. That’s only for tax purposes of course, and in theory a business could keep their public books differently as to depreciation. They certainly keep books differently, and legitimately so in lots of other areas of accounting. For whatever reason IME, that’s generally not done for depreciation.
IIRC when desktop/portable computers first entered the business world they were scheduled as 7-year property, just like a typewriter or adding machine. Only a bunch of years later did IRS bow towards reality and adjust computers down to 3-year property. Much later yet they became directly expensable, which amounts to “instantly depreciated”.
So yes long depreciation periods back then were/are silly vs the sustained rate of progress / obsolescence in IT tech in the last 50(!) years. But no, all the company bean counters everywhere are not to blame.
Faster depreciation amounts to the government giving a subsidy to business through a tax cut. Watching the ever growing size of the national IT spend back then, IRS (or Congress more like) was in no rush to give up any of that blossoming fountain of sweet sweet tax revenue.
Probably the first individual drive to break the 1 GB barrier was the IBM 3380 announced in 1980, which consisted of two 1.26 GB head-disk assemblies similar in concept to modern IDE Winchester-type drives, but different in implementation. This was not at all like a modern HDD, though – the two drives and their controller weighed half a ton and in today’s dollars cost around $300,000.
I’m not familiar with Conner but the earliest modern-style 1 GB drive I know of was developed by Digital Equipment Corporation. At a time when disk drives resembled washing machines or refrigerators, this was surprisingly in a 3.5" form factor, though it was still hugely expensive and not the sort of thing you’d typically find in a PC. This would have been sometime around the mid-90s. I’m pretty sure it was developed in-house but may well have used the magnetic heads your company developed. Digital sometimes rebranded third-party products in their entirety, but they had a pretty significant mass storage R&D and manufacturing facility in Colorado Springs at the time.
And every drive had slightly different positioning of the heads, so you could never be sure if a disk formatted on your drive would be readable on any other drive.
I have a bunch of 5.25 floppies and an old drive for them, but no cables. You can still buy a USB 3.5 floppy drive for about $20, but not anywhere a 5.25 floppy drive. Now there isn’t anything worth any effort to try and read those disks, it would just be fun to cobble together the drive on modern equipment.
At one time I used an IBM Series/1 and the eight-inch floppy diskettes it used. (Interestingly enough, it was to develop and manufacture Winchester magnetic heads at IBM.) So when this story showed up a few years ago, it brought back some memories.