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Neito posted:Joke. Zip drive failure rates and click of death syndrome
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Oct 23, 2021 00:20
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| # ? Apr 28, 2024 06:33 |
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And Saliva had a song called "Click, Click, Boom"
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Oct 23, 2021 02:58
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FilthyImp posted:Thread anachronism, but there's no way companies would spend money to give you a generic or branded USB when they can print out a QR Code or Serial Number to register on steam. Yea, that makes sense, but it seems odd to sell a part that lets you connect to the internet with tech that a lot of people don't have anymore. I think the install for one of my internet services came on a drive key. I remember ZipDisks, and how your buddy would put all these sweet wad files on his, and bring it to the lan party and for 3 hours people would try to get it to work while everyone else is playing Quake 2. Wasn't there another format? SuperDisk or something? I remember seeing an ad once for it.
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Oct 23, 2021 07:58
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"hark! louder! louder! louder! louder! here, here! — it is the clicking of my dying zip disk!”
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Oct 23, 2021 08:32
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The Zip click of death was a very short-lived problem only affecting drives made in a ~4-6 month window, but it's one of those things that has spread around the internet and now every single person who ever used a Zip drive claims it happened to them. Same with the claim about bad disks destroyed drives, which then destroyed other disks and other drives... It probably happened 3 times ever and then got exaggerated until everyone thinks it happened every day.
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Oct 23, 2021 11:15
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Sweevo posted:The Zip click of death was a very short-lived problem only affecting drives made in a ~4-6 month window, but it's one of those things that has spread around the internet and now every single person who ever used a Zip drive claims it happened to them. I only sold a few dozen of them over a period of probably 18 months, but I remember having a near-enough-to 100% failure rate. They always felt crazy expensive down here (aus) as well. I wasn’t sad when CD burners killed them off.
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Oct 23, 2021 14:49
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twistedmentat posted:Yea, that makes sense, but it seems odd to sell a part that lets you connect to the internet with tech that a lot of people don't have anymore. I think the install for one of my internet services came on a drive key. My undergrad school standardized on SuperDisks, which was a 3M standard that held 120MB and the drives could also take regular 1.44mb floppys. It seemed fine, never used it enough to know if it had click of death problems.
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Oct 23, 2021 15:17
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Superdiscs were much better than Zips, the drives would accept floppies or Superdiscs, they were quite reliable, and fit in cases and pockets that accepted regular floppies. They just came out a little later, and ZIP discs already had a foothold.
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Oct 23, 2021 16:32
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I wish Superdisk had become more widely adopted, holy hell. While I’d never experienced the click of death firsthand (though I have seen it happen), about a third of my Zip disks lost their data and became unusable when I was in art school. For how much those goddamned things cost, that was intolerable. edit: yes, ugh, art school, I know it was a huge waste of time. That’s where I saw the click-death happen too
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Oct 23, 2021 20:44
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Superdisk drives also had a feature where you could format a regular 3.5 floppy disk to hold 32 MB (only readable in superdisk drives obvs) I remember I wanted a superdisk drive but I ended up with a zip drive because zip was fairly common at like school/library etc.
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Oct 23, 2021 21:03
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There were also rare LS-240 Superdisks and drives, probably about as rare as the 2.88MB floppies and drives.
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Oct 23, 2021 21:05
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I never had one but I had a friend who was huge into technology in the 90s/00s and got his hands on anything you could think of. He had like 4 zip drives and they all failed but I will concede it's possible he bought them all in that 4-6 month period the other poster was talking about.
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Oct 23, 2021 21:06
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For all the trouble people had with Zip drives, Jaz drives were even sketchier. A hundred bucks for a 1 gig cartridge, and you’d better be careful with them, because if you hosed one up bad enough, they would ruin the drive you inserted them into. They were basically hard-drive platters in a plastic box with a mechanism that would lock them tight when the cartridge was ejected. They were pretty quick though, I think you could get 10mb/sec out of them, which was screaming fast for external storage at the time. They were SCSI-only though, so they were never very common in PC’s, more of a Mac thing.
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Oct 23, 2021 21:26
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I think there may have been a couple of Jaz drives in the Media 100 labs at the school I went to, since they ran all that software on Power Mac G4s. Fun story (where ‘fun’ = ‘meh’): When I first went to check that school out in the summer of ‘98, they had labs with SGI workstations, but a year later they switched to PCs for everything in the CGI department, and most of the projects we did were in 3dsmax, with Maya being an elective. I was disappointed (the first of myriad such disappointments) but in retrospect I super don’t care.
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Oct 24, 2021 04:42
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KHLAV KALASHNIKOV posted:I think there may have been a couple of Jaz drives in the Media 100 labs at the school I went to, since they ran all that software on Power Mac G4s. I was thisclose to throwing a bunch of cash at a Jaz... uh, ecosystem (?) complete with a SCSI card. Then I read about SyQuest's stuff and drat near jumped on that sinking ship. I'm still amazed I somehow managed to dodge two walking dead storage formats.
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Oct 24, 2021 05:08
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I still have a working Zip disc with all of my old radio production stuff on it, was still good last time I checked it.
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Oct 24, 2021 05:54
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Sweevo posted:The Zip click of death was a very short-lived problem only affecting drives made in a ~4-6 month window, but it's one of those things that has spread around the internet and now every single person who ever used a Zip drive claims it happened to them. To the extent that I saw it happen, personally, dozens of times, yes, it's cultural memory. They never fixed the problem. We all just learned to avoid it. We burned through disks like tissue paper. Save everything twice. Take a drive apart. I'll tell you the problem. The head (reader) is attached by two fine copper wires. Zip drives were made with an aggressive mechanism that homed the head. For some reason, they set that spring very tight. When you insert a disk, the first thing it needs to do is find the zero block. If it can't find the zero block, it extends the head and smashes back to home (the click). Once it's done that about 10-15 times, the head comes loose. Now the head is dragging on the disk. This scratches the disk and there's no recovering it. Now that the head has broken off, it will ruin any other disk that you insert thus propagating the failure to the next. It's the first, and maybe only, mechanical virus I'd ever seen. It was not made up. It was real. I was there. It was constant. If they fixed it a few years later, good for them. It was too late. We still used Zip disks, but we were very careful and always made multiple copies. Seriously, I probably went through a hundred Zip disks when I was in college. I owned about 3 drives over time. They were easy to take apart so the failed ones were easy to confirm the diagnosis. It was a piss-poor design of the head. Fun fact, the guts of those external drives are basically held in by gravity. Also, the eject spring is inconsistent. My buddy had one that would shoot the disk across the room when you ejected it. You had to put your hand in front of it. It would go about 6 feet on eject.
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Oct 24, 2021 07:06
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PuntCuncher posted:I only sold a few dozen of them over a period of probably 18 months, but I remember having a near-enough-to 100% failure rate. I remember that dumb early 2000s dick smith ad with the father shopping for his kid and he’s like “and we need a hundred floppy disks” and the dick smith salesperson says in the most smug fuckwit way “how about a Zip drive?”
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Oct 24, 2021 08:58
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I remember one of our buddies got Warcraft 2.. on like 22 three and a half inch disks. We would go to one house, spend like 2 hours installing it, then to the next house - it took like a week for us all to get it installed. CD roms at this point were encased in a special housing, like the floppy part of a floppy disk in the shell; so it was a new tech that almost nobody had adopted. I remember our 486 dx 33/66 had a 210 megabyte drive and my dad got a tape drive to 'back it up' just in case. Took like 5 hours to do a backup, probably just as long to restore. This was basically right before Pentiums hit the market making all those $4k+ 486's a bad investment. I also remember being so insistent that we not boot directly into windows(95) that you had to run the windows os as a command from dos 6.2; because all my telix software and games were dos based and I loved my BBS's back in the day. Running a half-assed wildfire bbs on my dad's fax line to get co-sysop status on the local bbs's for full file download access(porn). Pre-internet computer culture was super weird.
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Oct 24, 2021 10:09
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I don't think I ever had a zip drive problem. I used them daily, downloading music with napster at the university computer lab (only had dialup at home). The discs were not ever treated gently..
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Oct 24, 2021 14:19
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mostlygray posted:To the extent that I saw it happen, personally, dozens of times, yes, it's cultural memory. They never fixed the problem. We all just learned to avoid it. We burned through disks like tissue paper. Save everything twice. lmao that rules.
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Oct 24, 2021 15:19
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Zip's biggest problem wasn't unreliability. It was that they were sssllllloooooooooowwwwwwww.
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Oct 24, 2021 15:21
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Sweevo posted:Zip's biggest problem wasn't unreliability. It was that they were sssllllloooooooooowwwwwwww.  I remember dreading having to do anything with them solely because of the speed. It was nice to transport larger files but it was the digital equivalent of loading and shipping a tanker overseas that takes months versus hopping in one of those tiny planes that only takes the better part of a day.
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Oct 24, 2021 16:02
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I used a Zip drive at uni for a multimedia class and the first and last step of any session was copying your project file to/from the desktop. Because if you forgot and tried to edit directly from the disk then it was a 5+ minute wait every time the software auto-saved.
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Oct 24, 2021 16:14
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Even with the laugh track, this is so much worse than Big Bang Theory ever could have been.Macdeo Lurjtux posted:Master of Magic was mine, along with the sweet memory of my dad spending Christmas morning fiddling with memory allocation on our 386 so I could play it. Samuel L. ACKSYN posted:Superdisk drives also had a feature where you could format a regular 3.5 floppy disk to hold 32 MB (only readable in superdisk drives obvs)
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Oct 25, 2021 04:12
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The progression of physical media removable storage really defines that generation of computer touching. I remember when Jaz drives came out, it was just like: welp. I guess that's the new thing that we'll have to get used to.
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Oct 25, 2021 04:18
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twistedmentat posted:
tell us more about the goths telling you to shut up
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Oct 25, 2021 06:00
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What about Orb drives? They really came and went without much trace.
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Oct 25, 2021 10:16
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BogDew posted:What about Orb drives? They really came and went without much trace. when Tromp wins again in 2024 and starts the Imperium of Man, Orb Drive will be the technology that propels us across the stars 
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Oct 25, 2021 12:14
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Yessod posted:tell us more about the goths telling you to shut up I've been doing that for 30 years, of course is Andrew Eldrich. Is there anyone out there still running OS/2? One of my friends back then, oddly the same one who was way into scsi, would evangalize how much better it was, and how it could do true multitasking. But could it play Doom? Or Warcraft 2? Nope, then what good is it?
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Oct 28, 2021 08:07
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twistedmentat posted:I've been doing that for 30 years, of course is Andrew Eldrich. Try growing up in a Mac family  We had Marathon, but no one I knew had a Mac. I was severely disappointed when Doom finally got a Mac port, after two straight years hearing about it, and it kinda sucked.
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Oct 28, 2021 20:38
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Iron Crowned posted:Try growing up in a Mac family Oh I loved being a Mac kid in the 90s. I had Kid Pix and Wolfenstein 3D and MYST and then in ‘99 our Performa died and Dad replaced it with a monster DELL XPS that came with Rogue Squadron and Tomb Raider and I never looked back for 8 years until I went to college and started dailying Macs again
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Oct 28, 2021 21:06
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twistedmentat posted:But could it play Doom?
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Oct 29, 2021 00:25
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Out of nowhere, portions of a song from a cartoon popped into my head. It's Do the Freak, a rip-off of Monster Mash, done for Captain N. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfHmEB9G1bk Song starts at 16:15 if it doesn't automatically pop up. Outside of that, I had not watched Captain N since it originally aired. I'm not going to revisit it further as I assume all of it was this bad.
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Oct 29, 2021 03:33
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Someone explained why they went with Character Name Legally Distinct Drawing but I can't remember it and it was so, so much a part of what made that show a crazy experience.
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Oct 29, 2021 03:39
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Iron Crowned posted:Try growing up in a Mac family A lot of people i knew in growing up had Mac Classics, and they had SimCity and SimEarth, which just seemed like the coolest things. Though the best version of SimCity is the SNES version. I had an Apple IIGS which actually is considered a really good computer these days but back then Pfft, window'd. Or what ever OS/2 called it (actually that's pretty cool)
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Oct 29, 2021 04:39
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lol did that warthog slug blow its load on a cupid
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Oct 29, 2021 05:25
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RC and Moon Pie posted:I'm not going to revisit it further as I assume all of it was this bad. Was it really even any good when it originally aired? I mean, the cartoon segment of goddamn Video Power was better than Cap’n N, and that show sucked too. Video games were still mostly for turbonerds back then so they treated video game media just like that. Dorky as hell.
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Oct 29, 2021 15:20
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enwSyQo8d7k
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Oct 29, 2021 17:02
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| # ? Apr 28, 2024 06:33 |
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KHLAV KALASHNIKOV posted:Was it really even any good when it originally aired?
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Oct 29, 2021 17:49
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