/vr/ - Retro Games

>>9752637
1.2MB was only on the 5 inch double sided double density or high density disks, which IIRC were not popular.

Generally the commonly used capacities for IBM systems by the time systems were popular in homes were 360KB and 720KB for 5.25 inch, and 720KB and 1.44MB for 3.5 inch.

It would have been very uncommon for systems to have anything other than a 1.44MB 3.5 drive by the time ZIP disks were popular.

But yeah, they were an answer to having an easily re-writable medium like that of a floppy in larger capacities that make it actually useful around that time and with much faster access. 1.44MB (a little less when formatted) was a pathetic amount around the time ZIP disks came out and the 2.88MB format never took off.... which still would have been pathetic by then. CD burners were very expensive back then, and even if you had one they were not randomly re-writable like a floppy or ZIP disk was. CD-RW did not come out until a few years after the first ZIP disks and on top of them still being very expensive while they could be re-written if you wanted to change anything you basically had to wipe them and re-write them again in one shot. Compatibility could also be iffy. (And any proprietary software that let you treat them like a randomly re-writable drive in the same way a floppy could generally took a massive hit on the available space on the disk as well as it's speed, on top of now making the disk formatted in a proprietary way that only computers with that same program can now read)

Some of the first USB flashdrives would not exist until around 2000 (zip drives launched in 94), and back then in the Windows 95/98 era you needed to install drivers for EACH one, having a generic USB mass storage driver was not a thing until Windows 2000/XP. Plus they were expensive and started out at capacities laughably smaller than the first zip disks while costing considerably more (IIRC the first one was 8MB). I remember paying about $100 for a 128MB one around 2004