My wife’s newer laptop didn’t come with a floppy drive. A couple of times, I’ve read files into it using the floppy drive in the desktop we have shared over the network.
It’s not an issue that comes up often.
Yep. Alot of the usb flash drives come in a housing designed to make it easy to plug them in and pull them off. Apparently, the best ergonomic design for this looks kinda like a thumb.
Re Zip Drives
As others have said, most people knew that cheap cd burners were coming. Why spend money on a drive which will hold less, has disks that cost more and won’t work in most machines, when you can just wait a few years and buy a cd burner?
When my boss was organizing his yearly biofeedback/EEG conference, one of the presenters mailed us his presentation data, and papers on the research he was doing. He sent it on a zip disk. Nobody in the office had a zip drive.
I work for a software company, and I’ve never used a Zip drive, and never even had the need.
For meetings with clients, we bring a lap top.
For in-house tranfers, we have a “transfer directory” on the network.
For excel/word/powerpoint transfers, email works fine.
For distributing software to a client, we use a file-server, basically.
When we get new data-bases from clients, it’s almost always on CDs that they’ll send through the mail.
I don’t know what anyone would need a Zip drive for and I work on a computer 8 hours per day. Even when they first came out, I remember people saying, “you can put 100 MB on this, and just move it to another computer.”
And I was thinking, “I’ve never had to move 100 MB of anything to another computer.”
Then you’ve never worked with graphics.
…or video. 
If USB had been around when they first came out it might be a different story. It’s great for working on large projects between computers. I bought one of the 750 mb units and rarely use it even though it works faster/better than a cd burner. Usually I just use the 1gb chip out of my camera if I want to swap a bunch of stuff.
**Why weren’t Iomega ZipDrives more popular? **
Because I bought one.
Guess who killed the beta VCR, too?
The LS-120 drive didn’t help, either. It could accommodate a 1.44 MB floppy or a special 120MB disk. I’m not sure exactly how popular they are/were; all I know is that my previous two computers had them and you can still get the 120MB disks.
Wrong on both accounts.
My first job was with a start-up company developing efficient video conferencing software. I worked on mathematical engines, but everything we did was over a LAN.
I don’t think the nature of the application has much to do with whether you have to use a Zip drive, but rather the nature of your network, and how you interact with your clients.
Actually, what I’d offer up is that Zip drives would have become useful (and popular) if computer memory proceeded like it has for the last 10-12 years, but computer networking remained like it was in 1994.
I don’t think those “thumb sticks” or whatever you call them are going to prosper either. I mean, for transferring pictures, videos, music to and from computers, you almost always can just use a USB connection between two devices.
I don’t “do” music over the computer, though, so I might be wrong about that.
I have to disagree here. For people that have to do data transfer on the fly to and from all sorts of different PCs, carrying around and setting up a USB cable style peer to peer connection every time you want to transfer from one PC to another new PC would be a huge pain in the ass compared to popping in a thumb drive. Sending large files or file collections over the net is also fraught with problems as many corporate email inboxes choke when the attached file set(s) being sent or received get beyond a few megs.
Thumb/flash/pen drives are fast, small, sturdy, inexpensive (relatively) and individual capacities are pushing into the multiple gigs. Some I think they’re going to be around for the long haul. Newer PCs can even boot off them.
It doesn’t sound like you are all that familiar with flash drives. Get yourself one. You’ll be surprised how useful it is.
That would probably work fine if the two computers are next to each other. The thumbdrive works when the computers are 20 miles apart. If you only use one computer, then you might not find a USB drive useful. If you work on computers at different locations, you probably will.
I don’t like having personal files on a work computer, but sometimes it’s nice to be able to do personal tasks on the work PC. The USB drive works well for this, and they fit in a pocket better than a CD or floppy.
I NEVER have the need to do that, and I’m not going to construct a need just because I have a device.
Just what are the applications you guys are using these things for?
We work with large databases here, software releases, lots of graphs, some presentations. We never use them.
I’m not sure what we have for in house servers, but they’re sufficient for anything we do in house. Like I said before, for meeting with clients, we bring laptops, and CDs.
The lap-top, we just put on the network for doing any large data transfers.
My God! Did you not get the testosterone memo?
“construct a need just because I have a device”
That’s what we do Trunk!
Trying to erase mental picture of Trunk as a prissy Mr. Chips character with pursed lips
The USB drive is quicker than burning a CD. You are right, if you don’t have a need then you don’t need one, but I suspect if you had one you would find uses for it. Thay are fairly inexpensive, so pick one up if you get a chance and play with it.
I worked with a developer who was doing the grunt work for a CICS/GUI/Windows application in our office and upgrading on our customer’s hardware (while doing similar projects for other customers). The customer did not want to allow us to tie our networks together, preferring that we walk in with the data on a disk, then import it through an isolated machine on their system with a heavy duty firewall and security application. (Customer’s choice, not ours.) She ported the stuff back and forth on a Zip drive with no trouble (and a lot less work than carrying a dozen 3.5" disks). She could then work on the project at home or in our office while multi-tasking other projects from other customers while tapping into resources available at our office that the customer chose not to buy.
I am not arguing for Zips, it was definitely clunky, with the need to install Iomega on both machines. However, this was a year or two prior to the universality of CDs and it worked well for those applications.
I have a Zip that has provided some seriously useful backup in the past–but I haven’t used it since I installed a CD burning device a few years ago.
When I want to work at home, I have two choices. Lug in a laptop, load in the latest build of our software and then lug it home (and have to worry about at least the remote possibility of the laptop getting stolen if I stop to do anything on the way home). Or…load the code into a 1 ounce gadget and put it in my pocket.