Relic drive seen today (mac)

brent

at the thrift store. can anyone identify this? I swear that's an Iomega Zip drive opening/size but nowhere on this Mac contraption does it say that. The firewire is Mac. Don't recognize it device. Obviously a drive of some sort. Their version of Zip?

Staudey

Sounds/looks like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperDisk

The design of the SuperDisk system came from an early 1990s project at Iomega.

brent

Staudey fascinating article. Iomega's original intention was to replace the 2.5 floppy forever...had no idea this started as a Mac project. I'm not sure all that info about formatting is correct at the end: the Zips were not pure Fat16 in that they were distro-agnostic. It was either mac-formatted or pc-formatted. In fact in '94 they began the PC Zip drive and orphaned this project...
...I did not know there were fundamental differences in the Super Disk (mac) and the Iomega Zip drive (PC) like magnets and such.

I wonder if a modern mac or pc would recognize/detect/mount the superdisk or zip drive, respectively?
I wonder why $35 dollars for a vehicle for an obsolete medium (zip)?

edit/thanks for the info staudey

stalebrim

Staudey thanks for reading what the tag says 😆

WetGeek

brent I wonder why $35 dollars for a vehicle for an obsolete medium (zip)?

Maybe they'e hoping for a collector? Mac users can be a little interesting.

brent

stalebrim I make it way too easy for you to fulfill your imperative of mocking me; still, I prefer querying those I trust rather than 'conventional' research sometimes.

Staudey

stalebrim You're welcome.

stalebrim

WetGeek Yeah and weird things may have a surprising value.

brent

WetGeek it's got to be because it's a seminal one-of-a-kind project. the first one for zip drives before they were called zip drives. history probably. I'm trying to think of the Windows equivalent of historical value but I can't even think an old 3.5 drive would go for that much...or maybe it would...while brand new 3.5 floppy drives exist on ebay for about $30...but the old Tandys and Commodores I think resale for thousands if I had to guess...

WetGeek

brent brand new 3.5 floppy drives exist on ebay for about $30.

On Amazon, too. A couple years ago I bought one to access some photos that were returned from a processor on a 3.5" stiffy drive. A better deal, too ...

brent

WetGeek 1.44MB....sigh...I remember🙂 . I actually wasn't bad using DOS in the day...sometimes I actually preferred it.

stalebrim

brent Time for a CLI linux as a daily driver.

brent

stalebrim my learning curve died at a CLI linux web browser...

stalebrim

brent Yeah, it isn't very comfortable to browse modern internet on lynx or whatever. Some sites are nicely formatted, though.