Flack wrote: Another thing I would add? The hard drive. Instead, they added things like calculators and the Zip Drive. THE ZIP DRIVE. The Zip Drive was an expensive alternative to floppy disks that didn't catch on and can be found in every thrift store for about $3.
Flack, you're making one mistake, like thinking that because you're able to write grammatically now, that taking Second Grade was unnecessary way back when.
When the Zip Drive came out it did a really great thing. It provided the capacity to transport a (then) whopping 100 megabytes of data for about $8 or so. It gave you the capacity of a hard drive in a portable container you could stick in a shirt pocket.
Plus you plugged it in to the printer port with a DOS device driver to turn it into an extra disc drive, so basically it hooked up to almost any computer. Later they had an IDE version that you just connected to the hard drive cable, put it in a 5 1/4" or (without rails) 3 1/2" slot, and you had a machine that you could insert a 100 mb hard drive any time you wanted, remove it and take it with you.
More than once, backing up everything I did at work onto a Zip disc saved my bacon when I'd made a mistake and could go back to a previous set of files.
I've owned both the portable and the IDE Zip drive. I probably still have some Zip discs even though I don't own a Zip drive any more.
It was great and it provided a really good solution for being able to carry a lot of files in not a lot of space.
The problem was because Iomega acted arrogantly as other alternatives came along, instead of possibly licensing alternative manufacturers or otherwise allowing prices to fall, they kept the price of zip disks artificially high. As other more cost-effective alternatives became available Iomega failed to recognize the market was changing.
When the other one with gigabyte removable drives came out - was it the Jaz? - I bought one of those. It was from some company other than Iomega, I forget whom.
Then CD burners really became affordable. With CD-RW drives and packet writing using the UDF disk format, it more-or-less spelled the death knell for Zip (and Jaz) drives. Now you basically have a 79c floppy disc that holds 500 meg. An $8 100-meg zip disk or $12 gigabyte Jaz cartridges can't hold a candle against a disc that holds 1/2 a gigabyte (later boosted to 700 meg) costs about 79c and is essentially rewritable hundreds to a thousand times.
For really large backup now, you can buy a Blu-Ray writer, the price is down to a shocking $99 at Micro Center. I was wrong about the price, too. I first thought Blu-Ray blanks are about $9, but I was wrong. Blu-Ray is competitive with DVD-R, about $2 each for a 25GB disc in quantity 10 vs about 26c each for a 4GB DVD in quantity 50, which means to get 25GB all in one disk, the 'penalty' is only 75c over DVD. So if you have to backup 25 GB, you can spend about $1.55 and use 6 DVDs or spend $2 and use 1 Blu Ray. Given the extra convenience for large backups it's noise.
I bought an external USB DVD writer I planned to use for something back around late 2009 and I think I paid $70. At $99 for a Blu-Ray writer I'm seriously considering getting one, my MP3 collection could fill at least 1, I think my last music backup used over 4 DVDs.
After I wrote the above I checked; there are probably duplicates but currently my music directories alone contain 52 GB, 378 folders and 34,098 files. Video takes up another 12 GB and another 3,100 files. My master directory, the "C:\Paul" directory is another 48 GB and circa 143,000 more files; it includes the video files; if I recounted both, it's 60 GB and 146,000 files.
