History of Modern Technology : Zip vs. CD

Storage didn’t just get bigger; it got personal. We rewind to the late ’90s and early 2000s to unpack the clash between Iomega’s Zip drive and the laser-lit world of the CD—two formats that taught a generation how to back up, carry, and truly own their data. From the pain of 30‑floppy installs to the thrill of dropping a 700 MB burn into a jewel case, we dig into what made each medium take off, where they stumbled, and why their lessons still shape how we save files today.

We start with the super floppy dreams behind Zip 100—engineering choices, bold “Click. Zip. Done.” marketing, and the way creatives, students, and IT teams built daily workflows around blue drives and rugged cartridges. Then we confront the trust crisis of the “click of death,” the lawsuits and lost archives, and how fast‑rising alternatives—CD‑ROM, cheaper external hard drives, and the first USB sticks—changed the game. Along the way, we share real‑world snapshots: college labs checking out Zip disks like library cards, E3 press kits living on cartridges, and NASA quietly slotting Zip into space for portable transfer.

Next, lasers take center stage. We chart the CD’s leap from digital audio to data with 650–700 MB per disc, the fall in drive costs, and the cultural surge fueled by Myst, Encarta, and Wing Commander. CD‑R and CD‑RW flipped the script by giving anyone the power to publish, archive, and share—burning playlists, handing off portfolios, and shipping software at scale. We revisit the AOL CD blitz, the DVD capacity boom, and the slow fade of optical drives as broadband, flash storage, and cloud sync took over. Through it all, a throughline emerges: good storage changes behavior. When saving is simple, people back up. When media is portable, they create and share more.

By the end, you’ll see why Zip and CD were more than formats—they were habits, rituals, and signals of identity in an era when data became a part of daily life. Hit play, ride the nostalgia, and take away practical lessons on redundancy, media reliability, and the tradeoffs behind every storage shift. If this brought back memories of your first burn or the dreaded click, subscribe, share with a friend, and leave a review to keep the conversation going.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Setting The Stage: Storage Stalls
• 2:48 Floppy Fatigue And User Needs
• 3:44 Iomega’s Vision And Zip 100 Launch
• 5:35 Marketing Frenzy And Adoption
• 6:43 Everyday Zip Use And Prestige
• 7:42 The Click Of Death Crisis
• 9:07 Competitors Rise: CD, HDD, USB
• 10:17 Zip’s Legacy And Bridge Role
• 11:24 CD Origins And Capacities
• 12:59 [Ad] Inspiring Tech Leaders - The Technology Podcast
• 13:33 (Cont.) CD Origins And Capacities
• 13:49 CD-ROM Goes Mainstream
• 15:33 Burning, CDR/RW, And Workflows
• 17:13 Culture Shift: Music, Games, AOL
• 18:53 DVD Arrives; CDs Peak
• 20:03 Downloads, Flash, And Optical Fade
• 21:33 Reflection On Ownership And Backup

Transcript

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I can do that.

SPEAKER_01: 0:28

And welcome to Technology Tap. I'm Professor J. Rod. In this episode from Zip Drive to CD, the battle for the future of storage. Let's get into it. Welcome back to Technology Tap. I'm your host, Professor J-Rodd, and today we're traveling back to the fantasy crossroads in computer history. The late 1900s and early 2000s, an era where technology was evolving at breakneck speed. Computers were faster, graphics richer, and software heavier than ever before. But storage, storage was stuck. The 1.4 megabit floppy disk, once the king of convenience, can barely hold a single high-resolution photo. Files were getting bigger. Software suites like Microsoft Office, multimedia programs like Adobe Photoshop, and games like Mist, Quake, and Half-Life were ballooning in size. Enter two Titans of storage, each promising salvation. The zip drive, a bold reinvention of the floppy disk from a company named iOmega, offering massive capacities at a time when 100 megabytes seemed infinite. And the CD ROM, born from a collaboration between Sony and Phillips, transforming compact music discs into vessels for data, games, and multimedia. Today we'll explore who created these technologies, how much they cost, what made them successful or fail, and how they shaped competing for an entire generation. The end of the floppy era. By the mid-1990s, 3.5 inch floppy disks had reached its limit. At 1.44 megabytes, it simply couldn't keep up. Programs like Microsoft Office 97 came on 30 floppies. A single PowerPoint where images could fill a disk. Backup strategies became jokes. No one wanted to swap 40 floppies to save their hard drives. The world needed something familiar but bigger. Users didn't just want more space. They wanted the same experience as the floppy. Simple insert, drag, save, eject. No formatting tricks, no special tapes or drives. This was the gap that IOMega Corporation saw. Founded in 1980 in Royal Utah, I Omega started small, building backup products like the Merminian box, which used flexible magnetic platters provided by Eric Cushions. These products were fast and reliable, but expensive, aimed at business, not home users. By the early 90s, IOMA's engineers became dreaming of a super floppy, something affordable for customers, but powerful enough for professionals. Their mission? 100 megabytes in your pocket. The birth of the zip drive. In 1994, IOMega has released the first zip drive along with its zip 100 disc. Storage 100 megabytes. That's roughly 70 times the floppy. Technology, advanced magnetic coating, price heading possession positioning, and a rugged cartridge. Design sleek, blue, portable, about the size of a paperback novel. Price, the drive itself costs$199, and each disc costs$19.95. For many users,$20 per disc felt steep until they realized it can store the entire hard drive. I remember buying one for the office at work, and it was very, very bright. Like it was amazing when it first came out. It connected via parallel port, slow by modern standards, but universal in 1994. Later versions added SCSI, USB, and even internal IDE models. The marketing blitz. i Omega didn't just launch a product, they launched a movement. Their marketing was bold, cheeky, and confident. The tagline, click, zip, done. TV commercials showed users tossing floppies in the trash. Magazine ads promise, forget the floppy, meet the zip. And it worked. By 1996, the zip drive was everywhere, bundled with gateway PCs, sold in Best Buy Owls, and adopted by universities for student backups. Real World Memory. College computer labs stacked with shared zip drives. IT departments issued discs to students like library cards. By 1997, iOmega claimed to have shipped over 12 million drives and 100 million discs. Everyday life with the zip drive. For many users, the zip drive was freedom. Graphic designers use it to move Photoshop projects between home and office. Students stored turnpapers, early websites, and entire portfolios. Business used zips for backups, cheaper than tape, easier than external drives. I remember those days. In 1998, journalists covering the E3 Expo carried zip discs loaded with press kits, one disc for each company. Zip drives became a badge of tech credibility. If you had one, you were serious about computing. The click of death. But success hit a ticking time bomb, literally. Users began reporting a loud click click-click sound when inserting disks. Soon after, total data loss. The infamous click of death was caused by drive misalignment, which would physically damage discs, making them unreadable on any drive. iOmega initially denied the problem, calling it user error. Lawsuits follows. Tech magazine published exposes. In 1999, a graphic design firm lost a client's entire archive, hundreds of hours of work, to the click of death. Trust evaporated. Competitors and the fall. Other storage options were rising fast. CDR drives were becoming affordable, holding 650 to 700 MB per disc. External hard drives were dropping in price. USB flash drives arrived around 2000, starting at 8 MB, but climbing rapidly. I Omega tried to fight back. The ZIP 250 came out in 1998, 250 meg per disc at$250 cost per drive. And the zip 750 in 2002, 750 MB, USB 2.0 backward compatible. But it was too late. By the early 2000s, the IOMega glory faded. The super floppy era ended as quickly as it began. Reflection: The zip drive was the bridge recrossed and then left behind. The legacy of the zip drive. Despite its decline, the zip drive deserved credit. It bridged the gap between the floppy and the optical disc. It introduced customers to high capacity removable storage. It made back up a household idea, not just a corporate one. Today zip drives are a collective items, a symbol of the late 90s computing boom. Fun fact: NASA used zip drives on the International Space Station in the early 2000s for portable data transfer. From floppies to zip, we moved hundreds of megabytes at a time, but just as Omega reached its peak, another technology, sleek, shiny, and read by lasers, was waiting in the wind. A shiny new medium, the compact disc, was born from collaboration. In 1979, Phillips and Sony joined forces to create a digital audio format to replace vinyl records and cassettes. By 1982, the first commercial CDs hit the market. Billy Joe's 52nd Street was among the first albums released. Each disc stored 74 minutes of digital audio, about 650 MB of data, a stunning figure compared to the 1.44 MB floppies. Engineers chose 74 minutes so a CD can hold Beethoven's 9th Symphony in full at Sony's co-founder Akill Morella's request. Turning music into data. Engineers quickly realized the potential beyond music. By the mid-80s, Sony and Phillips introduced the CD-ROM, the compact disc read-only memory, a format for computer data storage. Each CD-ROM can hold around 650 to 700 MB, the equivalent of 450 floppies. The first CD-ROM drives appeared in 1985-86, primary for business and academic use. Cost around$1,000 for the drive and$500 to$100 per disc. Early adopters, encyclopedia, database, and reference tools. The Groller Electra Electronic Encyclopedia in 1995 was one of the first customer CD ROMs fitting the entire library's worth of text on one disc. And I remember when I first bought my first CD ROM, I bought it at Electronic Boutique on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. And it cost me with a sound card$385. I think that was in 1994, 1995. No, wait, I bought it at Comp USA, not electronic boutique. Comp USA, a big store, had a huge store on Fifth Avenue in the 30s, somewhere, a long time ago. Alright. CD ROMs go mainstream. By the early 1990s, CD ROMs became a household name. Drives dropped by price. By 1993, an internal CD-ROM drive cost about$200. Wow, they ripped me off. And pre-recorded disc around$20 to$30. Software publishers embraced the format. Microsoft and Carta, a multimedia encyclopedia, came out, missed a groundbreaking CD-ROM game with rich visuals and audios. The Sims, SimCity 2000, and Wing Commander 3. Oh, I loved Wing Commander. Maybe I'll do a story on Wing Commander. They had um the guy from Star Wars was the voice of Wing Commander. Luke. Yeah, he he would voice that. I think I'm gonna do an episode on Wing Commander. All leverage the capacity for full motion video and sound. Nostalgia. Installing Mist in 1993 felt like stepping into the future. Lush graphics, ambient soundscapes, all from one gleaming disc. The rise of the CD burner. At first, CD ROMs were read-only, but users wanted to create their own disc. CDR Recordables introduced in 1990, mass of the adaptation by 1995. Drives cost$1,000, blank disc cost$20 each. By 1999, the drives dropped to$200 and discs to$1 each. I remember we had them at the office, and then I don't remember buying my first one. I guess it must have come with a computer, but they're the standard now. Then came the CD RW, the rewritables, allowing data to be erased and rewritten a bit slowly and less reliable. Everyday life with the CD. By the late 1990s, music fans burned album and playlists, business distributed software on CDs. Gamers installed titles like Half-Life, StarCraft, Age of Empires 2. Schools and universities handed out courseware CDs. Anadult, I still remember buying Encarta 97 in a jewel case that probably said contains 32,000 articles, 10,000 photos, and 50 videos. It was the internet offline. For home users, the CDR became the go-to for backup, documents, photos, and even early digital music libraries. And one company that really took advantage of the CDs, hold on to your hat, guys, if you remember, American Online. American Online sent its installation software on almost every magazine that ever came out. Like if you were a tech and some and you went to fix somebody's PC and they asked you, hey, can you install America Online on my PC? All you had to do was go to uh any magazine that they had at their house, flip to it, and most likely you would find an American online CD in there. They were everywhere. Like you like you could just go and buy any magazine, and there was America Online CD in there. The blitz that they made for that campaign was absolutely amazing. Because they they put like you you couldn't you could not see not see uh America Online CD, they were everywhere. So for those of you who don't remember, they were everywhere. Yeah. DVD Looms CD peaks. By 1996, the DVD arrived, offering 4.7 gig per layer, seven times the CD. Still, CDs held on. They were cheap, familiar, and universal. By 2000, over 20 billion CDs were produced annually. That's every year, guys. Artists released albums on CD into the streaming era. Software installs shipped on CD well into the 2010s. Fun fact Microsoft Windows XP shipped on a single CD just fitting under the 700 MB rule. The slow fade. As broadband spread and USB drives grew, CD lost. Flash drives offer rewritable pocket-sized convenience, digital download replace physical media. By 2010's laptop like Apple's MacBook Air shipped without optical drives. Yeah, and that's true. Laptops don't ship with CDs anymore. You you have to specifically ask for it, get like a gamer PC or buy just USB. Like the companies will tell you, yeah, our laptops are the battery will last longer and and all that. Yeah, because they took out everything inside and they'll make you buy via USB. So I think it's I think they make more money if you buy it that way. Today, CDs lived on mostly on uh as music nostalgia and retro storage, but their influence remains. The legacy of zip and CD. The zip drive and the CD taught users to own the data, to backup, archive, and carry it. They bridge analog and digital. From floppy swapping to burning discs, these technologies gave us a hands-on relationship with our files. There were also uh democratic scene for the first time. Anyone can publish, share, and store gigabytes of personal content. And that was true. You know, this was the the era. I mean, it was an amazing time when new products were coming out all the time. And you know, the C the zip drive and the CD and the DVD, you know, they were you know that's when everything changed. Everything, you know, you Netflix changed, right? You you didn't have Blockbuster anymore, everything just went digital now with the CD and the and the DVD. You know, the zip drive, unfortunately, it it went like a rocket, and just like a rocket does sometimes, just exploded in midair and and crashed really hard. But yeah, I remember the click of death on on a couple of my former coworkers when you know it was just click, you hit it click, click, click, click, click, and it was that's it. It was nothing you can do about it. You know, it was good, and it did teach people how to back up, right? Because if you had a zip drive, you could back up your whole hard drive, and that's and that's when people started really taking backup seriously, was because it was as with anything, you make it convenient for people, they would do it. But if you make it hard, i.e., sit there with 40 floppies trying to back up your stuff, right? Disc one, disc two, disc three, you know, that people are not gonna be able to do that. But with the zip drive and the CD, especially when the rewritables came out, you know, you gave the people the opportunity to back up their stuff. So this is when people started taking ownership for the for their own computer, and it was and it was a good thing as far as as the user experience is concerned, right? You you were finally saying, I'm gonna take ownership of of the stuff that I have, of my my hard drive, my you know, personal space. Because before, I mean, even now, nobody, you know, nobody backs up at work their their their PCs. Everything is stored you know on a server which is stored on the cloud somewhere. But back then, but people had to back up their stuff. And you know, it's not like nowadays people will back up the whole thing, the operating system, the whole thing on these zip drives and CDs, because who wanted to reinstall 40 disc of Windows, you know, 95, 98? Nobody wanted to do that. Nobody. So this this uh became a lot easier with the zip drive and the CDs. And you know, and it was good to see that people were were taking computing a little bit more serious, but you know, they're they're they're all gone now. Like, yeah, I have a CD in a DVD, a Blu-ray, I think, on my computer, and one on my laptop, but I specifically had to ask for that on the side, right? I I didn't it didn't come with it. So nowadays they're they're gone, guys. This is you know, it's the end of an era, you know. You go to you know, the the CD morphed into the DVD, the movie industry, the music industry changed for a little bit, right? Companies were making millions, millions of dollars on DVD sets and DVD movies, but everything moved to streaming now. That's a revenue that they've lost, right? Uh, not being able to re-you know you can have a movie barely make profit in the movie theater, but then make money off the DVD, and make profit off the DVD. You don't have that option anymore. That option is gone. I mean, I'm gonna I should do that. Like how how the movies went from from video to DVD, how video renting you would make money, and then DVDs came out and people would buy them, and how that whole thing's changing to to streaming. And I have a I have some issues with that also, uh, DVDs and streaming, also, and maybe I'll make an episode on that. Yeah, but if for those of you out there who remember the zip drives, if you rem if you have any horror stories to tell, yeah, let me know. Professor Jrod at gmail.com. I will love to hear some of your stories with the zip drive failures. I'm sure there are people out there who who who crashed and burned, you know, in the early in the early to late 90s with the zip drive. Or how was the experience with your CD ROM and your DVDs? How did that affect? Did you you know migrate over very quickly with the death of the zip drive, or did you hang in there a little bit with the zip drive? But all in all, that wraps it up through our journey through the zip drive and the CD era, a time where storage became personal, portable, and powerful. The zip drive gave us capacity we've only dreamed of, while the CD put information, music, and multimedia in our hands. Together, they bridged the floppy age and the digital frontier, paving the way for DVDs, USBs, cloud storage, and beyond. I hope you like this episode of Technology Tap. I'm Professor J Rod. Subscribe and share with a friend who remembers burning their first CD or hearing the click of death. And as always, keep tapping into technology and we'll see you on the next episode. This has been a presentation of Little Cha Cha Productions art by Sabra, music by Joe Kim. We're now part of the Pod Mat Network. You can follow me at TikTok at Professor J Rod at J ROD, or you can email me at Professor J Rod Jr. at gmail dot com.