ThisNext Blog

Do you remember all those pleasant moments with your zip drive? Of course you don’t. In comparison to other storage devices, including the floppy disk, external zip drives were an absolute fart in the wind. In their heydey, zip disks retailed at about $30 each with external drives at three times that price and the entire set-up gave you at tops, 250 MB of storage. At the time, it was exactly the same storage as a Gmail account.

My favorite feature of the zip disk was how on a weekly basis I could sneeze and corrupt all of my files. A few ill-fated institutions including my college, managed to install zip drives into every computer lab rather than installing burners, while simultaneously blocking access to external FTP sites. (Only to replace the drives with burners two years later.) Meanwhile, during those 2 dark years, students shelled out small portions of their federal loan loot (usually reserved for beer) to ensure they could work on their files both at home and in the lab. It was all such a despicable and unnecessary money grab and years later it still manages to grind my gears.

Enter the Zip Immortalized:
I would love to throw one of these dinosaurs into a tar pit; however, as a more eco-friendly solution, the aptly named New Jersey Etsy Seller “Geek Gear” recently launched a line of desk clocks made from recycled Iomega zip drives. Sleek in their silver obsoletion, the clocks retail at $30 - a steal at one fifth of their original price.