Iomega ZipCD - Back to Home
Many years ago, probably 2017 or 2018, I got this Iomega ZipCD drive for around 5 dollars from an eBay auction. The seller actually lost money due to my purchase, since shipping easily cost at least double what I bought it for. However, in the end, I was the one who was scammed, since despite being listed as working & "near brand new" the thing didn't work at all. Returning it for 5 dollars was not worth my time, so I still have it sitting in a file cabinet. But, since it's a mildly interesting piece of computer history, I figured I'd show it off on this website.
Iomega was by far most known for their Zip drive lineup in the mid-late 1990s, but they had plenty of other misadventures in computer equipment. The Clik drive & Jaz drive are probably their next most known products, but from what I understand, neither were ever that popular. The Iomega ZipCD was probably their most boring & forgotten product of the 90s, since it's just a regular CD-RW drive in a bright purple enclosure.
My drive is labeled as being made in March 2001, which I'm guessing is towards the later end of production. It does use USB, which is nice, since most external drives of that time used the parallel/LPT port. It also has RCA audio out jacks, and S-video, which is a bit weird.
As said previously, unfortunately, my ZipCD is completely dead. No matter what I do, it shows no signs of life. Not that I'm losing a whole lot, since I have at least 3 other external CD drives, but it would be cool to have a working drive in the crazy Iomega purple colors. If the internal drive is at fault & the enclosure still works, then maybe someday I'll replace the dead drive with a working one.
Speaking of dead things, after years of complete irrelevancy in the computer world, Iomega was bought by EMC in 2008. The Iomega name was killed in 2013 & rebranded as LenovoEMC, until that was also axed in 2018.
Thank you all for 20,000 views on the site; the basement situation is mostly fixed now, so hopefully I'll return to more frequent activity this September.