Iomega zip drive

Remember the Iomega zip drive? It was sometime in the mid-1990s that I bought my first and only Iomega zip drive. At that time, the zip drive was causing a big buzz among computer users because at long last, a company with the correct vision had come out with a portable high capacity disk that had a lot of potential to replace the ubiquitous 1.44Mb floppy disk. The first generation Iomega zip drive came with a 100Mb zip disk. Wow, a zip disk of this size meant that I could transfer about 70 pieces of my floppy disks and then throw them away. The only drawback I could see at that time was to carry the zip drive everywhere I went but hey, it wasn't such a big deal and besides, it looked cool to show off the gadget.

However, after about a year of use, the drive developed problems. At first, it struggled to read its own disks and then one day, it died. Completely. I felt devastated, even cheated by the technology failure. It was the one and only Iomega zip drive I ever bought. I never replaced it. My data on the zip disks? I had it copied out somewhere else to CDs.

Of course, Iomega went on to make bigger capacity drives and storage devices. But I couldn't be bothered anymore. In Penang where they had a factory, the company underwent a restructure and became known as Venture Electronics Services. Today, in the newspapers, it is reported that the company has retrenched 70 management staff, including six managers, due to the global economic downturn. Sad.