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Comment by porknubbins | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of zipdiscs, I think they made those too.

Imation made the superdisk, competed with zipdisc and the drive could also read 3.5" "floppy" disks with the same formfactor.

Iomega was involved with 3M in Floptical development which is a tech ancestor to the Zip and LS120 formats.

Iomega was so hyped back in the day. Many people lost money on that play. Kind of glad I was too broke to invest at the time.

Less of an "ancestor" and more of a rival.

I never understood why, as much as they both eventually succumbed to cheap CD-Rs and later flash drives, the Zip drive was more successful than the SuperDisk.

Did Iomega get some important OEM wins? I seem to recall more retail PCs advertised with Zip drives built in than SuperDisk, although you'd think "you don't need to add another $10 to the BOM for a regular floppy drive" would be an appealing message to large OEMs.

Or maybe Imation, spun off from 3M's massive financial muscle, couldn't compete as aggressively.

I've turned into a bit of a SuperDisk drive hoarder; I've got one in my main desktop-- and a stack of spares I've shucked from external enclosures.

Wikipedia says zip drives were introduced in late 1994, and ls-120 were introduced in 1997.

Zip disks opened up a world of not terribly expensive storage much larger than floppies, but with similar characteristics. There wasn't any real competition, so lots of OEM deals happened, especially in school / library shared use situations.

The LS-120 is a nicer product, and it includes a high precision regular floppy drive, and it means you only need one 3.5" device... except that it had to compete with the entrenched zip disk that was almost as good. Plus around that time, cd-r drives were becoming affordable; media characteristics are different, but capacity was much larger.

Compatibility didn't matter as much because you couldn't count on people having either a Zip drive or an LS-120. Iomega had the solution: a portable version of the Zip drive that connected to the parallel (printer) port. That thing was very popular for 'exchanging' software in those days ;)

> Did Iomega get some important OEM wins?

Yeah. Apple. Pretty significant.

Zip disks were Iomega.

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