Opinion: Zip and all that jazz

Just when they were about to call the vet to have the thing put out of its misery, EMC waltzed up and slapped a couple of hundred million notes on the table. Obviously nobody told the EMC finance department that nobody uses ZIP drives these days.

Time was when everyone had a ZIP drive. Why wouldn’t you? Back then there were no USB sticks with gigabytes of storage. Your choice for transporting data without using the network was a 1.44MB floppy (yes, that’s right it was megabytes not gigabytes) or….well…even older floppies with even less storage. The 100MB offered by the ZIP drive was positively gargantuan by comparison. And don’t forget that back then the humble LAN ran at a mere 10Mbps when it was working.

So what went wrong? Iomega, makers of the ZIP drive, wasted oodles of time and oodles more dollars trying to stomp on some dude in Europe who started making blank disks for their previous ZIP drive. Not content to own 99 percent of the market Iomega sent in the lawyers with all guns blazing to sue the bastards into submission. And the outcome?

Instead they bought the offending company and realised there was no longer any point suing … themselves. Meanwhile, they’d been beavering away in the back room and built a huge timber and earth dam. No, wait, wrong analogy. Iomega built a better ZIP with 250MB of storage which kept printing and publishing shops happy as they sent their finished art around the suburbs in taxis.

After the ZIP maxed out at 750MB, Iomega finally came up with a new model and called it JAZZ. Woo-hoo! Funky! Well it was, because it held 1GB and that was not to be sneezed at when PC hard drives only held a few gigs themselves. The problem was the price. And the fact that the old ZIP disks wouldn’t work in the new JAZZ drives so you had to chuck away everything and start again. This theory never works despite endless attempts by marketroids to convince us that it will surely work this time. Anyway, you could buy a spare hard drive for the cost of the JAZZ blanks so they were doomed, and before Iomega could think of a better way, USB sticks arrived and sent the ZIP and the JAZZ into the peat bogs with Piltdown man.

Since then the company has been floundering around making removable optical drives that hardly anyone bought, and add-on hard drives for the SOHO market, which some people actually bought. You’d have thought if anyone could have parlayed the move into solid state storage it would have been Iomega, the company which all those years ago pioneered moving data around without losing bits along the way. Perhaps now that EMC will be in charge, with plenty of R&D funds, we will once again see Iomega ruling the portable storage world.

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