nostalgia noun nos·tal·gia nä-ˈstal-jə nə-, also nȯ-, nō-; nə-ˈstäl- 1: a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition also : something that evokes nostalgia
1. Respectful Nostalgia Share nostalgic content and memories respectfully. Avoid offensive or insensitive references that may be hurtful to others.
2. Relevant Nostalgia Posts should focus on nostalgic content, including memories, media, and cultural references from the past. Stay on topic to preserve the nostalgic theme of the community.
3. Source Verification If you share nostalgic media or content, provide accurate sources or background information when possible.
4. No Spamming Avoid excessive posting of similar nostalgic topics to keep content diverse and engaging for all members.
5. Positive Discussions Encourage positive discussions and interactions related to nostalgic topics. Respect different viewpoints and memories shared by community members.
6. Quality Content Strive to post high-quality content that sparks nostalgia and meaningful conversations among members.
7. Moderation Guidelines
Respectful Behavior Treat fellow members with kindness and respect. Harassment or disrespectful behavior will not be tolerated.
Appropriate Content Only Ensure all content aligns with the nostalgic theme and community guidelines. Inappropriate or offensive material will be removed.
Engagement and Participation Engage actively with posts and discussions. Constructive feedback and contributions enrich the community experience.
By adhering to these rules and guidelines, we can create a welcoming and enjoyable space to relive nostalgic moments together. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to reach out to the moderators. Thank you for sharing your nostalgia responsibly!
cross-posted from: https://lemmit.online/post/2824472
This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/nostalgia by /u/singleguy79 on 2024-05-03 04:24:44.
The community college near me had zip drives on the library computers. I bought one primarily so I could download Netscape there and bring it home because doing it that way was faster than using our dialup connection.
That's more or less how certain public clouds manage migrations in some cases.
I've watched a company load up 2PB of data into a tape library, have them stack it full of bubblewrap, then roll it onto the back of a truck with the tires deflated for a softer ride, then driven across town to a new datacentre at 3am on a Sunday.
Effective data rate: 1PB per hour.
The bandwidth's okay, but the latency sucks.
click - your data is lost
I liked them anyways. The IDE drives were fast and cheap, CD-R was still too expensive.
I still remember getting my first TDK burner, and going through mad numbers of CD-Rs due to failed writes. Those will always be the days.
In the end we just lugged around hard drives and used a quick swap bay.
These days you have USB hard drive docks.
Remember MiniDisc? The one and only true storage medium! Hail MiniDisc!
It could’ve been a great computer storage medium, but it took far too long to be sold as such. By the time minidisc was being marketed as floppy/zip replacement, cd-Rs were a thing.
But minidiscs were so much cooler. They came in neon colours and you felt like a super hacker man when you clunked them into a player and used them for storing data rather than music.
Neo used MiniDisc in Matrix. 'Nuf said.
IOMEGA! IOMEGA! ONE ZIP DISK TO RULE THEM ALL! ALL SHALL BOW!
But yeah. I may be nostalgic, but MiniDiscs were GOAT af, let’s be real.
Mine was password protected and had Bulma’s boobs and incredibly confusing feelings stored on it
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.
I once spent weeks trying to get a scanner, a printer and a zip drive to work on a single parallel port. Needless to say, it was a fool's errand. I ended up buying an ISA card with two extra parallel ports which after fiddling endlessly with interrupts kind of worked. Ah, the good old days. Now get off my lawn, damn kids!
This just reminded me that parallel port switches were a thing. You could change the dial or push a button to switch peripherals on port A or B.
Used to see Iomega stuff advertised in PC magazines back in the day. Always wanted them but was impossible for me as a child to acquire that kind of hardware
A company named "100MEGA Distribution", a Czech computer parts vendor (incorporated in 1994) has one of these framed at the reception.
ah, geek humor … “iomega” → “100MEGA”
No, the capacity was 100 MB, and we'd say "100 mega" [🔊 sto megga] for short in Czech.
As a computer parts & accessories store, they definitely sold these disks at some point in the 90s.
I think I used one of these things to just do a full directory copy of Civ2 and a few other games that were somehow installed on one computer in one classroom and bring them to my eMachine at home.
Fuck yes I do. I was really fortunate in that I never got the click of death, and so a straight hundo at the time was future tech now. I was using tech no one else around me understood, so it was rad as fuck for me. I miss my Zip disks.
I remember the tv ad that ran for them. It was a like a Mission Impossible style data heist and a dude zipped his files to the drive and jumped out the plane before it could be hijacked or some such.
They had some really, um, 90s commercials: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppniBSWGgcg
And another thing I haven't worried about in close to thirty years: the Bermuda Triangle
Click! Click! Click!...
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 still have one =)
I haven't used it in 20 years, it keeps dust out of my chassis...
I just bought a drive for my retro machine
Yes. Hated them
.
You probably know this, but for anyone curious: Firewire was a different port/cable format than USB, and was used almost exclusively by Apple and Sony.
Punk ass kids like me appreciate the context lol.
God love universal. Work in a retirement home and have a bucket full of old cords for when running into older hardware.
I took for granted how easy it is to connect things now.
Things are much easier now, to be sure. The Mac/Amiga IOMega Zip drives actually used SCSI (pronounced "Skuzzy"), which was much faster than the parallel ports we Windows users got. I hope you don't have to deal with SCSI! The myriad connector types were a pain, and the termination was no fun.
Lots of video cameras and analog (eg. Composite video) to digital video converters had FireWire interfaces. At the time Apple (Final Cut Pro) and Sony (Vegas) also dominated the video editing software market.
That's true, it was big in the media world for a minute. Perhaps because Sony Vaio and Apple computers were used heavily in that space?
As I recall, Firewire was faster and more capable than USB, but USB was cheaper to implement on small stuff like mice and keyboards, so it became the defacto standard.
Jaz for me. Click of death. Never got one that lasted more than a week.
Remember zip drives?
Ironically, I do!
I wish I could find my old zip disks and drive at my mom's house. It has my old middle-school AngelFire website files from a site I ran called DBZPlanet. Was mostly me learning Photoshop to cut DBZ characters out of their backgrounds and adding glow to them. Along with basic news about when Cartoon Network would be airing the next set of English translation episodes. My first website.
I just went through my family's old zip drives and floppy disks from the basement out of curiosity. I had to borrow a friend's old "you never know when you'll need this again" zip drive and tower to get a parallel port again. Haven't found anything really interesting yet. DOS games and old taxes, mostly. Only one disk made the click of death, but I was able to read most of it still.
I found a USB version at the thrift last year!
My college AutoCAD projects remember.
Friend won a Zip drive at a computer conference and then we won a Jazz drive at the next one. He used iOmega stickers to write "Zip it" on his shirt. We used iOmega buttons to write "i Ω" across our shirts.
I just bought a drive for my retro machine
I never used them but I did have the zip-branded external CD-RW drive that came way later. I just looked it up and apparently it was notoriously crap but I never had an issue with it.
Zip disks themselves weren’t great but they got a pass because they were so much better than SyQuest
Had one for about a year then they folded
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.