By Gary Kirchherr
I started using Macintosh computers in that platform's Dark Ages, when color monitors didn't exist and hard drives were an expensive extravagance. Despite the myriad of improvements to personal computers since, for years nothing new came along to revolutionize the way your typical computer-user works. Oh, sure, computers and their peripherals are faster and considerably less expensive, but the equipment itself we view as indispensable is pretty much the same.
That's why the introduction of Iomega Corp.'s Zip Drive cannot be underestimated. The removable-storage device arguably is the most revolutionary new product since Sony came out with the 3 1/2-inch floppy disk in the early '80s.
When I first heard about the device early last year, I thought it was too good to be true. The $200 contraption, similar in size and functionality to an external floppy-disk drive, reads and writes to cartridges that look like jumbo-size floppies. But the cartridges use an entirely different technology than the cheap, slow and unreliable floppies. Zip disks are fast. They're dependable. They hold about 100 megabytes of data, compared with 1.4 megabytes of the largest-capacity floppy. And the Zip disks cost only $15 to $20, depending on how many you buy at a time.
The utility of the Zip Drive is immediately obvious to those of us who work with backups, especially of commercial software. This wasn't a big deal when such products came on one or several floppies. But when even an inexpensive popular commercial product such as ClarisWorks requires seven disks, keeping an extra set can be a hassle. And you need an extra set - floppies have notoriously short shelf lives, and you don't want to lose your investment because a $1 disk failed.
Backing up commercial software on the Mac is best done by using Apple Computer's free utility Disk Copy 4.2 to create "disk images" of the floppies you want to keep. Disk images are documents that store data from the copied floppy, making it possible to clone it. The disk images then are compressed with Aladdin System's StuffIt Deluxe and stored on the Zip disk. You can replace several large, cumbersome storage boxes of floppies with a small, flat plastic case you can fit in your pocket.
The Zip Drive's use extends beyond storage. Although its data-transfer rate falls short of a typical hard disk, it's still fast enough to use as an auxiliary hard disk when you need one. Its performance is acceptable as an alternate startup device.
Plain and simple, the Zip disk stands head and shoulders above the Syquest 5 1/4-inch removable cartridges and Iomega's own Bernoulli cartridges, the closest things to a Zip Drive at the time it was introduced. The Syquest cartridges - the de facto standard - and their drives are large, bulky and expensive. What's worse, they are nonintuitive. Zip disks work exactly like floppies - put it in the drive, there it is on the computer desktop; drag it to the trash, and out it pops. Syquest cartridges, by comparison, require pushing buttons and pulling levers just to get the darn things in their drives - and usually another step to get the computer to "see" them. Ejecting them requires the hardware "push-pull" after dragging to the trash. Who needs that kind of aggravation?
I am not knocking Syquest. For years the cartridges and drives they invented were the only practical way to transport large amounts of data. But this product seems destined to join another 5 1/4-inch product - the "floppy" floppy disk - on the computer scrap heap of history.
Contributing to the demise of the original Syquest cartridge may be Syquest itself, which has answered the Zip Drive with a similar device called the EZ135 Drive. The principal is the same as the Zip Drive, but its cartridges look like shrunken versions of the 5 1/4-inch kind, and can hold - you guessed it - 135 megabytes. In addition to the cartridges' larger storage capacity, the selling point is the data-transfer speed - twice as fast as the Zip Drive, and comparable to a hard disk.
All well and good, especially if the extra speed is important. But there are a few caveats. One, the EZ135 and its cartridges cost more than Iomega's product (although in fairness to Syquest, its price-per-megabyte is comparable to Iomega's). Second, the Syquest products are heavier and bulkier. And third - the clincher - are the lever and button on the EZ135, just like those on their original removable-cartridge devices. No thanks!
Zip products gained some notoriety for their scarceness and the long waiting list for its products. But fortunately, Iomega finally seems to be keeping up with demand.