Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
The Zip disks were much more robust than the Jazz drives. Our university had both in some departments during the era. The Zip disks lasted quite a while and did a good job (occasional failures). The Jazz drives had to be used on a perfectly stable surface because tapping them while they ran was a quick way to crash the head and destroy the disk.
Art departments, audio work, and larger data sets were kept on Zip disks. Much of the network was still Cat 3 wire (or even thicknet) with 10/100 hubs. Many of the computers being used couldn't move 100 MB with any real speed and many of them still had 1 GB internal hard disks. Burning a CD was still risky because Win95/98's scheduler sucked donkey balls and they'd fail to burn properly. Early CD blanks were $5-$13 each, so it was a big deal to burn a lot of them.
Also, there was no (or very little) centralized network file stores around campus. Most of the office workers had no place to even copy files to for sharing. You'd use the Zip disks and floppies for nearly everything if you couldn't get the windows file sharing to work directly from one desktop to another.
It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.