VOGONS


Who here has heard of this drive? :)

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Reply 20 of 28, by BitWrangler

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Matth79 wrote on 2021-10-14, 18:59:

and also kicked myself for not buying a case with a drive I fancied, a rare dual 5 1/4 - 3 1/2 in a single HH form factor

I left one of those behind in a long distance move, also an ~inch high 5.25 drive, is that third height of a full 5.25 or a quarter height? Anyway, what a dope!

Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, but all the totes of hens teeth and barrels of rocking horse poop give them plenty of hiding spots.

Reply 21 of 28, by Cyberdyne

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Strangely I also went from millions of millions floppies to a CD-RW drive and never looked back. Few friends had those Zip 100 drives, and that's was about it in Estonia. I really like the history, but have not really used them. We would usually use an old internal HDD for large transfers, just pop the lid, and connect. Well when the CD writing came, this was revolution. I had a 3,2GB Seagate for my main drive, but a CD-R would take a whopping 700MB so I really had to prepare for a writing session.

I am aroused about any X86 motherboard that has full functional ISA slot. I think i have problem. Not really into that original (Turbo) XT,286,386 and CGA/EGA stuff. So just a DOS nut.

Reply 22 of 28, by SBLive

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Cyberdyne wrote on 2021-10-15, 04:57:

Strangely I also went from millions of millions floppies to a CD-RW drive and never looked back. Few friends had those Zip 100 drives, and that's was about it in Estonia. I really like the history, but have not really used them. We would usually use an old internal HDD for large transfers, just pop the lid, and connect. Well when the CD writing came, this was revolution. I had a 3,2GB Seagate for my main drive, but a CD-R would take a whopping 700MB so I really had to prepare for a writing session.

That's how it was for me as well. Went from floppies to CD-Rs, though I always had a secondary HDD in a removable drawer.

I would prepare all the files I wanted to burn in a directory on the secondary hard drive and then just drag them over to Nero (and before that, Adaptec EZ-CD Creator) and burn, then delete them.

Then USB drives happened and the rest is history.

Reply 23 of 28, by rmay635703

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I never really used cdrw or zip
Floppies yes

Many times I had 2 PCs and would use a laplink cable to keep both mirrored

Transferring a full 1.2gb of data at a time over a link cable was fun (let it run all night into the next day)

Laplink was especially useful when setting up an antique computer because I didn’t have to have compatible hard drive controller just a bi directional parallel port.

Later on when hard drives got cheaper I would keep a disconnected hard drive in the case and occasionally back things up .

Reply 24 of 28, by Tetrium

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SBLive wrote on 2021-10-13, 23:15:
Not sure where exactly to post this, but here's my most prized retro obscurity - the Avatar Shark 250. It uses 2.5" removable "H […]
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Not sure where exactly to post this, but here's my most prized retro obscurity - the Avatar Shark 250. It uses 2.5" removable "Hardiskettes" that hold 250MB each. The drive inside is IDE and two interface cables were available that converted the drive to either PCMCIA or parallel port. A SCSI cable was announced in early 1998 but never released. The drive was sold for only a year and a half before the company went bankrupt in September 1998. Before the external model, the company tried to market the drive as an internal drive for laptops and desktops to be sold in OEM systems. They even had a really cool combo Shark/FDD combo drive that I could not find anywhere. The drive and disk format were originally conceived in 1989/1990 and patented in 1992 with an original capacity of 85MB. They later upped the capacity to 130MB, 170MB, 210MB, and finally 250MB. (The Post-It note was for the r/retrobattlestations Obscure Storage contest.)

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Interesting! I never even heard of this one before, but then again at around 1985 to 1995 or so there seemed to be more everswitching standards than there were days in a year 😜

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Reply 25 of 28, by Tetrium

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Horun wrote on 2021-10-14, 00:51:

Interesting and nice collection. By mid 1990's they would have competed with Iomega which had contracts with Apple and many OEM PC for including a backup ZIP drive. By 1998 things were shifting to CDR and they all sort of failed.... ;p

True.

For me this was a good thing in a way as this enabled me to get all of these 100MB ZIP disks for like €1 pr less each, which for me was much cheaper and more convenient than using CD-RW or CD-R. I had been using floppies till then. I had to basically copy everything 2 or 3 times on 2 or 3 different floppy disks if I wanted to make sure none of the data ended up getting lost due to the disk having some unreadable bits 🤣.

Also the external parallel ZIP drives were cheap and easy to find back then I I liked using them. Until I got some of the blue USB ZIP drives, these I always loved using even when I had moved to Windows 7.

Whats missing in your collections?
My retro rigs (old topic)
Interesting Vogons threads (links to Vogonswiki)
Report spammers here!

Reply 26 of 28, by SBLive

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Tetrium wrote on 2021-10-16, 10:14:

Interesting! I never even heard of this one before, but then again at around 1985 to 1995 or so there seemed to be more everswitching standards than there were days in a year 😜

This one came out in late 1996 and was very short-lived, since the market was already over-saturated and CD-R was way on its rise to the throne.

Had it come out in, say, late 1993 to early 1994, it would have probably kicked ass for a while.

Also, their pricing was absurd. $300 for the drive at launch (later $250 and finally $200) and $40 (later $30) for a single 250MB disk or $100 (later $80) for a 3-pack?

That was an automatic GTFO for me back then and now.

Reply 27 of 28, by Tetrium

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SBLive wrote on 2021-10-16, 18:40:
This one came out in late 1996 and was very short-lived, since the market was already over-saturated and CD-R was way on its ris […]
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Tetrium wrote on 2021-10-16, 10:14:

Interesting! I never even heard of this one before, but then again at around 1985 to 1995 or so there seemed to be more everswitching standards than there were days in a year 😜

This one came out in late 1996 and was very short-lived, since the market was already over-saturated and CD-R was way on its rise to the throne.

Had it come out in, say, late 1993 to early 1994, it would have probably kicked ass for a while.

Also, their pricing was absurd. $300 for the drive at launch (later $250 and finally $200) and $40 (later $30) for a single 250MB disk or $100 (later $80) for a 3-pack?

That was an automatic GTFO for me back then and now.

Just to clarify about the ZIP disks/drives I used, this was several years later (roughly 2003/2004) and I bought all of this stuff second hand and thus very cheap (I mean like €1 for 1 or several disks and at most €5 for each drive). By then it was obvious that USB thumbdrives and CDR/DVDR had replaced these by now so this stuff was sold like it was hot potatoes in the seller's hands 😜.

The pricing when new was one thing, but also that there was not really one single set standard (and even that didn't help for instance the 2.88MB floppy drive, mostly because of costs and because there were like a hundred ZIP-like alternatives available).

Whats missing in your collections?
My retro rigs (old topic)
Interesting Vogons threads (links to Vogonswiki)
Report spammers here!

Reply 28 of 28, by mR_Slug

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Reminds me of the iomega click drives. Thought that's what they were until I looked closer. Only used zip and that was briefly. I got a CD-RW in '98 and it was before they had sorted the buffering protection technology. So it wasn't very reliable at writing CD-Rs. Often you'd waste a couple of CDs just to write one. Got a zip drive and it was much more convenient and reliable. But one the CD-RW drives had their flaws ironed out, stuck with that.

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