For many years the floppy disk dominated the data backup market for the home user as they offered affordable data storage. Ok using floppies was akward, slow and highly unreliable but at the time it was all we had. Then along came the Zip drive and the world of data backup changed overnight thanks to the creator of the Zip drive – Iomega. No longer were you restricted to a paltry 1.4MB of disk storage – now you could fit 100MB on one single Zip disk. Later this increased to, a then, massive 750MB of storage space which was completely unheard of at the time.
Zip drives worked in almost exactly the same way as a floppy disk except they were physically bigger and provided a much higher data transfer rate than home users had ever seen before in an “external” data storage device. The biggest problem with Zip drives is that although they were similar to floppy disks you still needed a separate Zip drive to read or write to these disks which in turn meant more expense for home users. Also there was a rival technology called the LS-120 or SuperDisk that found favour with many computer manufacturers (ironically enough the Zip drive long outlived the LS-120...