Iomega
More info
- Released
- 1980
- Type
- Storage hardware
- Successor
- Acquired by EMC in 2008
The Utah company that sold removable storage to a generation that had outgrown the floppy but couldn't afford a second hard drive.
Iomega was founded in 1980 in Roy, Utah, and its first product was the Bernoulli Box, a cartridge whose flexible disk floated on a cushion of air. The breakthrough came with the Zip (1994): 100 MB on a disk the size of a chunky floppy, cheap enough for home use. The Jaz (1995) took the same idea to a gigabyte.
Zip drives were haunted by the "Click of Death", a clicking failure that could wreck both the disk and the next one you inserted, and a class action followed. Cheap CD burners and then USB sticks made the format pointless. EMC bought Iomega in 2008, and in 2013 what remained became LenovoEMC.