Government Computer News
An idea whose time has gone
GCN Lab review: REV drive offers handy, removable storage but in an outdated format
LET ME TELL you a tale of a fine technology that was released too late and is trying to make a comeback in a different form.
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This is the story of the Zip drive, and to set the stage, we need to go back to the days of the sneakernet. It’s 1992, and your boss wants a file you’ve been working on. So you save it to a floppy disk — either the 3.5-inch kind or the even older 5.25-inch kind, which really was floppy — and walk it over to her office. Your speed and comfort depend more on your shoes than your computer network.
Image: GCN
But the ability to move smaller files via the rapidly expanding world of e-mail hit Zip hard. Being able to save larger files and folders on CD-Rs, which dropped rapidly in price in the mid-1990s when Zip was still getting its feet wet, was the follow-up blow. That one-two punch KO’d Zip. Eventually, portable thumb drives effectively killed it.
The Zip drive might have been the ultimate disk drive, but that is like saying it was the most efficient dinosaur on the planet. Both the Tyrannosaurus rex and the Apatosaurus are dead, no matter which one was better.
Nevertheless, Iomega is still trying to resurrect its portable storage technology. If the Zip drive had been introduced a few years earlier, Iomega would probably be a household name.
The 120G REV drive is the company’s latest effort, and it fills a niche in the portable storage arena — for now. However, it suffers from the same problems as the Zip drive. For it to work as a sharing medium, there must be two of them. Otherwise, it’s like having a fax machine: Unless the person you want to send documents to has one, it does you no good.
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