I got given the parallel zip drive in the late 90s.
Didn't use it much until I went to university in the early 2000s.
This was when floppy disks were starting to show their limitations in terms of size, but USB pen drives were still quite small and expensive.
Most of the machines in the computer lab had Zip drives, and I bought an ex-lab G3 with an internal Zip drive.
Then the USB pen got bigger and cheaper, and when you could get 128MB on your keyring for < £10, that was the start of the end for the zip.
Mine has sat gathering dust for years, but the mac formatted zip disk I have and the prospect of using a SCSI as a Mac Plus HDD, plus the portability between it, the classic and the desktop PC (and from there via USB stick / network drive the G4, hackintosh, internet etc.) appeals.
Didn't use it much until I went to university in the early 2000s.
This was when floppy disks were starting to show their limitations in terms of size, but USB pen drives were still quite small and expensive.
Most of the machines in the computer lab had Zip drives, and I bought an ex-lab G3 with an internal Zip drive.
Then the USB pen got bigger and cheaper, and when you could get 128MB on your keyring for < £10, that was the start of the end for the zip.
Mine has sat gathering dust for years, but the mac formatted zip disk I have and the prospect of using a SCSI as a Mac Plus HDD, plus the portability between it, the classic and the desktop PC (and from there via USB stick / network drive the G4, hackintosh, internet etc.) appeals.