Remember Zip drives? – Failure of storage technology

Memories, zip drives, Cartivision. For many years, tech corporations still thought that proprietary storage formats that only worked with their very own materials were a superb idea for some reason. Though they often fail after a couple of years. So let’s take a take a look at the three “next big things” that got here with Betamax.

Firstly, Sony’s Memory Stick, how did they manage to trademark such a generic name? These bad boys first appeared in 1998 when standalone digital cameras were starting to realize popularity, and Sony digital cameras specifically were extremely popular. So Sony brat: Hey, what if we start selling our own flash drive that folks need to buy to maintain using our cameras? I mean, it worked great for PlayStation and that is exactly what they did.

Memory cards weren’t technologically superior to the more open Compact Flash cards or smart media cards, which were also common on the time, but quickly became popular attributable to the number of people that owned Sony cameras. In addition they worked on Sony’s digital Walkman players for the PlayStation handheld console, and even a variety of robot dogs that helped them gain a major share of the flash memory market within the early 2000s.

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But every part modified when the now-familiar SD card gained popularity because, unlike memory cards, it was an open standard whose developers pushed hard to adopt it in gadgets like other cameras. Especially in smartphones.

As they became an increasing number of popular, people bought SD cards to expand their storage, as cat photos and the larger sales volume of SD cards, fueled low-cost cards, which meant that flash drives were eventually put aside and even soy began selling SD-enabled cameras in 2010.

Next up is the I Omega zip CD, which differs from a flash drive in that it serves a purpose apart from just filling someone’s pockets. The entire thing looks like a bigger, thicker disc, which could lead on you to imagine that it was a floppy disk containing more data, which is strictly what it was, and never a 1.44 megabyte disk that rotated at 300 rpm . The unique zip drive was 100 megabytes and rotated at almost 3,000 rpm to hurry up data transfer. Later we also got 250 and 750 megabyte variants.

The ZIP disk also got here along at quite an affordable time, in 1994, when it was becoming extremely popular to work with files much larger than could fit on a floppy disk, but there was no good alternative yet. This led to ZIP drives becoming extremely popular within the mid-Nineteen Nineties, a lot in order that quite a couple of pre-built PCs actually got here with internal ZIP drives, especially PowerMax drives, making ZIP a extremely popular format amongst graphic designers, but despite ZIP drives’ undeniable usability and support for several different interfaces, sales declined in 1999.

This was at a time when recordable and rewritable CDs were hitting the mainstream, and blank CDs and burners were less expensive than proprietary zip hardware produced by only one company, not to say the notorious click of death that destroyed your data.

Finally, here’s something from back within the day that has a surprising resemblance to modern DRM, Cartrivision. It was the unique movie rental format that debuted in 1972, so it predated each VHS and Betamax. Unfortunately, Cartivision sucked. First, you’ll be able to’t buy a separate VCR-like player for it and connect it to your TV. You really had to purchase a mix TV with a built-in player, which originally sold for $1,350, which is the equivalent of virtually $10,000 today. And yet you didn’t get a very good rental or viewing experience. Not only was video quality notoriously poor attributable to limited space on tapes, but for those who desired to rent a movie, you needed to go to a store and order it from a catalog, then go home and wait for the title you wanted. I asked for it to reach by post. What form of quick gratification is that this? It is a less convenient version of Netflix’s original DVD delivery service.

These rental cartridges also had annoying limitations. They couldn’t be scrolled through, very like modern digital rentals and imposed viewing limits. This manner you might make sure that the film could only be watched once before returning it to the shop, where there was a special machine that would rewind the tape to the following one. Sorry, I mean the viewer, and on top of that, the inserts themselves were notoriously fragile. If you happen to leave them in a spot that’s a little bit too damp, they are going to disintegrate inside a couple of months. So it’s no surprise that Cartrivision was discontinued after just 13 months.

Are there every other technology failures from the past yr that you want us to explore? Tell us within the comments.