Omega zip disks

10 January 2010, 3:15pm

I posted on my main blog that I believe the kindle will go the way of the Palm handheld devices that existed before they morphed into mobile phones.

The Palm m100 was a gadget purchase that I regret.

The other dead technological item I readily recall is the zip disk.

Yesterday I discovered several of them in a box in my cupboard.

Zip disk

I'm curious about what's on them, if anything, but will probably never know because to read the disk will require a zip drive.

This article neatly describes the rise and fall of the zip disk.

They seemed revolutionary at the time, compared with the floppy disk.

The zip disks I found have 100MB storage space, or 70 times more than a floppy disk.

I bought a computer with a zip drive and must have had a dozen or so of the dinosaur disks at one stage.

The problem was portability. They were useless for transferring data if the other person didn't have a zip drive.

And the disks themselves proved unreliable after a time.

Of course, today we have memory cards and USB sticks that hold much more data in a smaller and more universal format.

Michael Gorey