retrocomputing

They were basically hard drives where the read and write heads were in the drive itself and the platter was in the zip disc. When it was released it offered 100MB vs the 1.44 you could fit on a similarly sized (but much cheaper) floppy. USB hadn’t even been invented yet, let alone USB thumb drives or SD cards, so it was kinda the only semi-convenient, semi-cheap way to move semi-large amounts of media around. I was a graphic artist when they came out and it was a huge improvement to be able to send a zip disk or two to a printer to print proofs.