Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Remember Zip Disks? – Failed Storage Tech”.
Memory sticks zip, drives cartridges for decades. Tech companies have continued to think proprietary storage formats that only work with their own stuff are, for some reason, a good idea, even though they tend to fail after a few years. So, let’s look at three next big things that went the way of betamax. First off the memory stick from sony which how did they manage to trademark such a generic name? These bad boys first appeared back in 1998 when standalone digital cameras were first starting to catch. On and sony digital cameras in particular, were very popular, so the brass at sony thought hey what if we start, selling our own flash memory that people will have to buy to keep using our cameras. I mean it worked great for the playstation and that’s exactly what they did. The memory stick wasn’t vastly superior technologically to the more open compact, flash or smart media cards that were also common at the time, but they quickly became popular due to how many people had sony cameras and they also worked in sony’s digital walkman players.
The playstation portable and even their lineup of robot dogs that helped them grab a good chunk of flash memory market share in the early 2000s, but it all changed once the now familiar sd card started gaining popularity because, unlike memory stick, it was an open standard whose Developers pushed hard to have it adopted in gadgets, like other cameras and especially in smartphones, as those became more mainstream. People bought sd cards to expand their storage because cat photos and the higher the volume of sd card sales, the cheaper they were driven, meaning that memory stick was eventually pushed aside and even sony started. Selling cameras with sd support in 2010.
Next up is iomega’s, zip disc, which was quite different from the memory stick in that it served a purpose other than just lining someone’s pockets. The thing looks like a bigger chunkier, floppy diskette, which might lead you to think that it was like a floppy that held more data, which actually is precisely what it was instead of a 1.44 megabyte disc, that spun at 300 rpm. The original zip disc, held 100 megabytes and spun at nearly 3 3000 rpm for faster data transfers, and we also got 250 and 750 megabyte variants later.
The zip disk also came out at a pretty sensible time 1994, when it was becoming very common for folks to work with files much larger than what a floppy could hold. But there wasn’t a good alternative. Yet this led to the zip disk enjoying a burst of popularity through the mid-1990s, to the point where quite a few pre-built pcs actually came with internal zip drives, especially power.
Max helping zip become a very popular format with graphic designers. But despite zipdiscs, undeniable utility and support for several different interfaces, sales entered a terminal decline in 1999.. This was when recordable and rewriteable cds were hitting the mainstream, and blank cds and burners were much cheaper than the proprietary zip equipment that only one company made not to mention the notorious click of death that destroyed your data yeah.
So they discontinued zip in 2003. But we’ve got another real throwback for you. That’S kind of the og netflix right after we thank zoho crm for sponsoring this video soho crm is a 360 degree solution for managing your business’s sales, marketing and customer service. It features an intuitive ui, as well as ai predictions to help you better understand your customers needs plus their design studio. Helps you customize your experience, so you can spot critical information at a glance. Zoho offers flexible contracts, transparent pricing and an ever evolving product that grows to meet your needs without snowballing, your costs so get 50 off your annual subscription when you use code zcrm 50, using the link in the video description.
Finally, here’s something from way back that has a surprising parallel to modern, drm cartrivision. This was the original movie rental format and having debuted in 1972, it actually predated both vhs and betamax. Unfortunately, cartrivision sucked big time for starters, you couldn’t buy a separate vcr-like player for it and hook it up to your tv. You actually had to buy a combination tv with the player built in which originally sold for thirteen hundred and fifty dollars that’s equivalent to nearly ten thousand dollars today, and yet you didn’t even get a particularly good rental or watching experience.
Not only was the video quality notoriously bad due to space constraints on the cartridges, but if you wanted to rent a movie, you had to go to a store and order. It from a catalog then go home and wait for the title that you requested to arrive by mail. What kind of instant gratification is that it’s like a less convenient version of netflix’s original dvd delivery service. These rental cartridges also had an infuriating limitation. You couldn’t rewind them similar to how modern digital rentals enforce viewing limits. This was a method to ensure that you could only watch the movie one time before you returned it to the store where they had a special machine that could rewind the tape for the next sucker. Excuse me, i mean viewer and to top it all off, the cartridges themselves were notoriously fragile if you left them someplace. That was a little too humid. They would disintegrate in a matter of months. So it’s not all that surprising that carter vision was discontinued. After only 13 months are there any other tech failures from yesteryear that you’d like us to explore? Let us know down in the comments and we may store your choices in a future episode.
Get it because this was all storage stuff. .