2019-12-02

I have had tremendous success with what I describe as a first generation model of the Zip Drive. The 100 MB seemed huge back in the mid to late 1990s. I remember installing games on the disks rather than my hard drive to conserve space. There is obviously no real use for this Zip Drive any longer, but I decided to see if I could still access disks via my Zip Drive and the task proved to be difficult. USB to Parallel port cables do not work because they do not push data in both directions the way the old Parallel ports did. So I could not get my modern desktops to talk to the Zip Drive, Linux would recognize the drive, identifying the device as Iomega but would not allow me to read the drive. If anyone has ever had success with USB to parallel port connector for zip drives please let me know and I will update this post and credit you for the information. I ended up installing Ubuntu on an old Dell with a parallel printer port and I can report that my drive still works. I last used the Zip drive briefly in 2008 to dump nightly MySQL backups to a disk. I thought I would do this until the unit failed, it turned out the need for the process came to an end before my Iomega Zip drive ever stopped working.
My Zip disks are all from 1994 or 1995, which in my opinion is impressive that I can still read them. A lot of burned CDs and DVDs no longer work after a period of time and these disks are over 20 years old. I decided that this will likely be the last time I have old enough technology available to access the drive, so I had better go through the old disks to collect anything I might want. Some of the items I found on the disks were quite an interesting time capsule.
Types of Files Found on My Zip Disks
- Old COBOL and REXX programs I saved when I left my COBOL programming job - 1998.
- Lot's of BMP files from the 1990s web.
- Desktop icons.
- Old Windows screen savers.
- QBasic programs, including the qbasic.exe itself.
- Email inboxes dumped from my first email accounts to a text file.
- Gaming screenshots.
- Letter of resignations and old curriculum vitae
- The aforementioned MySQL backups.
- Backup of our Front Page Sports Football leagues
- Backup of some of my very early web sites.
- A README.TXT created in 1995 explaining how to get the most out of your Zip Drive.
