20 Apr
2012
20 Apr
'12
11:32 p.m.
replying to Grumpy Ol' Fred (Fred Cisin)
I wonder what happened to the class action suit and
the regulatory actions?
Google found
http://www.iomega.com/rinaldi/
Rinaldi Class Action Settlement
Wikipedia clarifies that the settlement was a rebate
towards the future purchase of an Iomega product.
What a ripoff! They made a faulty product and instead of
paying a penalty with real money, they issued "funny money" coupons
useful only for BUYING more of their crap!
The Sharper Image pulled a similar ripoff during their bankruptcy.
All gift cards were invalidated, but were then honored
ONLY if you paid an equal amount towards a purchase.
What a steal: turning perhaps $100 million of debt
from pre-purchased gift cards into a matching-grant
program
to get another $100 million for their overpriced stuff :-/
Long ago, a fellow was so pissed off with his Vydek
word processor that he sponsored a floppy-flinging contest
for his stock of 8" floppies.
We ought to have a similar contest for Iomega products!
21 Apr
21 Apr
2:46 a.m.
On 04/20/2012 11:32 PM, Jeff Jonas wrote:
Long ago, a fellow was so pissed off with his Vydek
word processor that he sponsored a floppy-flinging contest
for his stock of 8" floppies.
We ought to have a similar contest for Iomega products!
After they "got suits" their stuff did indeed turn to crap, but let's
not forget to give some credit where credit is due. Back In The
Day(tm), I used a 20+20 (20MB per cartridge 8") Bernoulli Box daily for
about two years, VERY heavy use, and never had any trouble with it. I
never even had a cartridge fail, with probably thirty in use. Shortly
after that time, my employer was filled to overflowing with 44MB 5.25"
Bernoulli Boxes. We had some failures with those, but overall, for
removable media, they were extremely reliable.
I also used (and continue to use) a lot of Zip disks, the 100MB
variety, with very low (almost nonexistent) failure rates. I don't use
them anywhere near as often or as "hard" as the others though.
Around the time of the Jaz drive was when things started to go wrong.
Those things were all but useless; every single one that I knew of died
eventually. But before that, their removable mass storage systems were,
in my experience, quite good.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
11:44 a.m.
On 21 Apr 2012 at 2:46, Dave McGuire wrote:
Around the time of the Jaz drive was when things
started to go wrong.
Those things were all but useless; every single one that I knew of died
eventually. But before that, their removable mass storage systems
were, in my experience, quite good.
Well, you now know of two more Jaz drives that work just fine today.
I've still got a 1GB Jaz hooked up to an AT&T 6300 that's still is in
service. But, for that matter, I still have a Syquest Sparq drive in
service.
On the other hand, I'm not aware of any Syquest 44MB removable drives
still in operation.
--Chuck
2:45 p.m.
On 04/21/2012 11:44 AM, Chuck Guzis wrote:
Wow, that's pretty unusual in my experience. I'm glad you had better
results with them!
Around the
time of the Jaz drive was when things started to go wrong.
Those things were all but useless; every single one that I knew of died
eventually. But before that, their removable mass storage systems
were, in my experience, quite good.
Well, you now know of two more Jaz drives that work just fine today.
I've still got a 1GB Jaz hooked up to an AT&T 6300 that's still is in
service. But, for that matter, I still have a Syquest Sparq drive in
service. On the other hand, I'm not aware of any Syquest
44MB removable drives
still in operation.
Oh I remember those. I've never actually used one though. A friend
had a couple, not sure what kind of luck he had with them.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
3:14 p.m.
On 21 Apr 2012 at 14:45, Dave McGuire wrote:
Oh I remember those. I've never actually used
one though. A friend
had a couple, not sure what kind of luck he had with them.
Heh, I have a Jaz drive mounted in a Syquest SQ555 external case.
I seem to recall that the earlier Syquest drives were an odd size--
narrower than a 5.25" drive, but wider than a 3.5" drive. At one
time Halted had a bunch of dual-drive cases with power supply for
very cheap. I got one home and discovered that it could be made to
work, but only with a fair amount of sheet metal rework.
--Chuck
22 Apr
22 Apr
1:52 a.m.
On Sat, Apr 21, 2012 at 1:45 PM, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:
Back when 50MB on an Amiga was "abundant" (into the early 1990s), I
picked up a new Syquest44 drive for somewhere less than $400 including
at least one cartridge if not a couple more. I used it daily for many
years until 44MB was no longer adequate. It's still sitting in its
desk niche, in the same SCSI cabinet as my original sub-1X SCSI CD-ROM
drive (NEC CDR74?) It was working the last time I used it, but that's
been well over 10 years.
I know of other Syquest users with far less happy experiences.
-ethan
On the other
hand, I'm not aware of any Syquest 44MB removable drives
still in operation.
?Oh I remember those. ?I've never actually used one though. ?A friend
had a couple, not sure what kind of luck he had with them. 
9:07 a.m.
On 04/22/2012 01:52 AM, Ethan Dicks wrote:
On Sat, Apr 21, 2012 at 1:45 PM, Dave
McGuire<mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:
Back when 50MB on an
Amiga was "abundant" (into the early 1990s), I
picked up a new Syquest44 drive for somewhere less than $400 including
at least one cartridge if not a couple more. I used it daily for many
years until 44MB was no longer adequate. It's still sitting in its
desk niche, in the same SCSI cabinet as my original sub-1X SCSI CD-ROM
drive (NEC CDR74?) It was working the last time I used it, but that's
been well over 10 years.
I still have a working Syquest 270mb cartridge drive and over a dozen carts
for it (3.5" format) in a syquest parallel port interface box. The
internal
interface is Parallel IDE. The only thing that has died (recent too)
is the
wall wart and its' easily replaced. I got that back in the 90s. when 270mb
was a lot of storage even if fixed.
Allison
On the
other hand, I'm not aware of any Syquest 44MB removable drives
still in operation.
Oh I remember those. I've never actually used one
though. A friend
had a couple, not sure what kind of luck he had with them. 
11:23 a.m.
On 04/22/2012 08:07 AM, allison wrote:
I got that back in the 90s. when 270mb was a lot of
storage even if fixed.
I don't know, I bought a 245MB IDE drive to replace the 89MB one that was
in my main desktop PC, and that was in '93 I think - ~250MB at that point
was the typical 'big drive' for a PC (within a couple of years it was
around 500MB, then 750MB, then 1GB...).
I think 1991 or so was probably the point where rotating storage prices
started dropping really fast.
cheers
Jules
9:23 a.m.
desk niche, in the same SCSI cabinet as my original
sub-1X SCSI CD-ROM
drive (NEC CDR74?) It was working the last time I used it, but that's
been well over 10 years.
A question I have for years:
How hard is to find a Nec Intersect CD...I don't remember the model,
maybe it was the CDR74. It was a long, beige box, top-loader. You could
deattach the CD unit from the base, and use it as a diskman.
I'm looking for that for AGES. I need to document the pinout of the
connector of the drive. The Nec Turbografix 16 CD-ROM (this is a
videogame...) uses the same CD and same connector on it, and it is pretty
rare. If I can document the pinout, I can adapt a common CD on that and
still uses the game.
Greetings from Brazil,
Alexandre Souza, PU1BZZ
11:28 a.m.
On Apr 22, 2012, at 9:23 AM, Alexandre Souza - Listas wrote:
Oh wow, I used to have one of those. It was handy, if not exactly
reliable. I think it got tossed over a decade ago, before anyone had
any idea it might be useful/worth fixing. :-\
It was SCSI, if that's any help. If I do happen to find it in my
parents' house (don't hold your breath), I'll ping you.
- Dave
desk niche, in
the same SCSI cabinet as my original sub-1X SCSI CD-ROM
drive (NEC CDR74?) It was working the last time I used it, but that's
been well over 10 years.
A question I have for years:
How hard is to find a Nec Intersect CD...I don't remember the model, maybe it was
the CDR74. It was a long, beige box, top-loader. You could deattach the CD unit from the
base, and use it as a diskman. 
21 Apr
21 Apr
6:06 p.m.
On Sat, 21 Apr 2012, Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 21 Apr 2012 at 2:46, Dave McGuire wrote:
I've been told that Iomega named its products after the noises they made
when they fail.
--
David Griffith
dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu
A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
Around the time of the Jaz drive was when
things started to go wrong.
Those things were all but useless; every single one that I knew of died
eventually. But before that, their removable mass storage systems
were, in my experience, quite good.
Well, you now know of two more Jaz drives that work just fine today.
I've still got a 1GB Jaz hooked up to an AT&T 6300 that's still is in
service. But, for that matter, I still have a Syquest Sparq drive in
service.
On the other hand, I'm not aware of any Syquest 44MB removable drives
still in operation.
1:35 p.m.
On Apr 21, 2012, at 2:46 AM, Dave McGuire wrote:
I also used (and continue to use) a lot of Zip disks,
the 100MB
variety, with very low (almost nonexistent) failure rates. I don't use
them anywhere near as often or as "hard" as the others though.
I also had great success with Zip disks back in the day when 100MB was
all there was; I never had one fail, and I used them a LOT. They were
significantly more reliable than floppies at the time.
I never bothered going beyond the 100 MB ones, because at that point
CDRs were becoming economical enough that if I needed to transport
something that large, I'd just burn a CD.
Around the time of the Jaz drive was when things
started to go wrong.
Those things were all but useless; every single one that I knew of died
eventually. But before that, their removable mass storage systems were,
in my experience, quite good.
I had *atrocious* experiences with Jaz drives. They seemed to be the
best way to destroy your backups. They also tended to die right at
the worst time. I know other people with the inverse experience, but
I was never particularly pleased with them (other than their raw
performance as a removable drive, which was pretty good).
- Dave
1:49 p.m.
I also used
(and continue to use) a lot of Zip disks, the 100MB
variety, with very low (almost nonexistent) failure rates. I don't use
them anywhere near as often or as "hard" as the others though.
I also had great success with Zip disks back in the day when 100MB was
all there was; I never had one fail, and I used them a LOT. They were
significantly more reliable than floppies at the time.
2:48 p.m.
On 04/21/2012 01:49 PM, Cameron Kaiser wrote:
Yep, the Zip was the best way to set up a sneakernet. Before I had hardline
Internet at home and just dialed up, I would take Zips to work, download stuff
and take the disks home.
I did exactly that with 44MB Bernoullis. :-) That was a bit earlier,
though...we had dialup access at work (shell account, not PPP or SLIP,
transferred stuff with zmodem), I had no connectivity at all at home.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
I also used (and continue to use) a lot of Zip disks,
the 100MB
variety, with very low (almost nonexistent) failure rates. I don't use
them anywhere near as often or as "hard" as the others though.
I also had great success with Zip disks back in the day when 100MB was
all there was; I never had one fail, and I used them a LOT. They were
significantly more reliable than floppies at the time. 
3:06 p.m.
Who made the original 1GB (Maybe 2GB?)drive cartridge drive? I was going to say they were
a good product from what I recall but later Iomega bought them out and trashed the product
(I think they may have renamed the Syquest drives to Jazz or something).
But yes, the 100MB zip drives in my experience were quite reliable. The horror stories I
heard later with the damaged disks tearing the read arm, etc were with the later models
from what I recall.
- John
22 Apr
22 Apr
12:33 p.m.
On Sat, 21 Apr 2012, Sam Onella wrote:
Who made the original 1GB (Maybe 2GB?)drive cartridge
drive? I was going to say they were a good product from what I recall but later Iomega
bought them out and trashed the product (I think they may have renamed the Syquest drives
to Jazz or something).
But yes, the 100MB zip drives in my experience were quite reliable.
The horror stories I heard later with the damaged disks tearing the read
arm, etc were with the later models from what I recall.
Any idea what serial number series began the "bad" drives (or started the
good ones?)
g.
--
Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007
http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind.
http://www.diy-cockpits.org/coll - Go Collimated or Go Home.
Some people collect things for a hobby. Geeks collect hobbies.
ScarletDME - The red hot Data Management Environment
A Multi-Value database for the masses, not the classes.
http://www.scarletdme.org - Get it _today_!
Buying desktop hardware and installing a server OS doesn't make a
server-class system any more than sitting in a puddle makes you a duck.
[Cipher in a.s.r]
21 Apr
21 Apr
3:17 p.m.
On 04/21/2012 01:48 PM, Dave McGuire wrote:
On 04/21/2012 01:49 PM, Cameron Kaiser wrote:
Yep, the Zip was the best way to set up a sneakernet. Before I had hardline
Internet at home and just dialed up, I would take Zips to work, download stuff
and take the disks home.
I did exactly that with 44MB Bernoullis. :-)
I did the same with SCSI drives at one point; I had SCSI on the machines at
home, and it wasn't a big deal to drop a SCSI HBA into one of the machines
at work and just sneakernet a drive back and forth.
I never found CD to be particularly reliable, and at that point in time
there wasn't really anything else for moving reasonable amounts of data (I
did try DAT, but that seemed quite error-prone too). My home 'net
connection was fast enough that "floppy-sized" chunks of data I could just
transport by FTP or email.
cheers
Jules
I also used (and continue to use) a lot of Zip
disks, the 100MB
variety, with very low (almost nonexistent) failure rates. I don't use
them anywhere near as often or as "hard" as the others though.
I also had great success with Zip disks back in the day when 100MB was
all there was; I never had one fail, and I used them a LOT. They were
significantly more reliable than floppies at the time.
6:10 p.m.
On Sat, 21 Apr 2012, Cameron Kaiser wrote:
Yep, the Zip was the best way to set up a sneakernet. Before I had hardline
Internet at home and just dialed up, I would take Zips to work, download stuff
and take the disks home.
I did something similar except I used a Sun IPX.
--
David Griffith
dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu
A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
I also used (and continue to use) a lot of Zip disks,
the 100MB
variety, with very low (almost nonexistent) failure rates. I don't use
them anywhere near as often or as "hard" as the others though.
I also had great success with Zip disks back in the day when 100MB was
all there was; I never had one fail, and I used them a LOT. They were
significantly more reliable than floppies at the time. 
6:51 p.m.
New subject: Sneakernet; was Re: one good ripoff deserves another :-(
On Sat, 21 Apr 2012, David Griffith wrote:
I did something similar except I used a Sun IPX.
You mean you hauled your IPX back and forth? Interesting idea... did you
have 2 sets of monitors/keyboards for it, one at work and one at home?
Alexey
8:06 p.m.
New subject: Sneakernet; was Re: one good ripoff deserves another :-(
On Sat, 21 Apr 2012, Alexey Toptygin wrote:
On Sat, 21 Apr 2012, David Griffith wrote:
I ran it headless at both places.
--
David Griffith
dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu
A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
I did something similar except I used a Sun IPX.
You mean you hauled your IPX back and forth? Interesting idea... did you have
2 sets of monitors/keyboards for it, one at work and one at home? 
22 Apr
22 Apr
2:36 p.m.
New subject: Sneakernet; was Re: one good ripoff deserves another :-(
On Sat, 21 Apr 2012, David Griffith wrote:
When I was an undergraduate, the populer home computer here was the BBC
micro,. and the university had plenty of them on public access. You could
download stuff onto floppies and take them to your own machine.
Only problem was that I didn't have a Beeb. I did find that there was a
date transfer medioum I could read, though. Paper tape. I had a rather
nice puch/reader on my P850, and a serial punch/reader (only 30cps
:-() on my micros. So I'd get my files punched on tape and read them into
my machines.
It rather spoilt the fun when Ibought an M100 and got permission to plug
it into a spare RS232 port on the university PADs.
-tony
I did something similar except I used a Sun IPX.
You mean you hauled your IPX back and forth? Interesting idea... did you
have 2 sets of monitors/keyboards for it, one at work and one at home?
21 Apr
21 Apr
2:49 p.m.
On 04/21/2012 01:35 PM, David Riley wrote:
I made the same transition for the most part, but kept my Zip disks
around, and have recently started to collect some more. I'm planning to
use them on PDP-11s as removable boot media.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
I also used
(and continue to use) a lot of Zip disks, the 100MB
variety, with very low (almost nonexistent) failure rates. I don't use
them anywhere near as often or as "hard" as the others though.
I also had great success with Zip disks back in the day when 100MB was
all there was; I never had one fail, and I used them a LOT. They were
significantly more reliable than floppies at the time.
I never bothered going beyond the 100 MB ones, because at that point
CDRs were becoming economical enough that if I needed to transport
something that large, I'd just burn a CD. 
22 Apr
22 Apr
2:19 a.m.
New subject: one good ripoff deserves another / Iomega Zip's
On 04/21/2012 08:49 PM, Dave McGuire wrote:
I made the same transition for the most part, but kept
my Zip disks around, and have recently started to collect some more. I'm planning to
use them on PDP-11s as removable boot media. -Dave
Funny,
as the OP I asked for the ZIP drive spec in order to be able to use them as a replacement
for the old, slow & unreliable 10 MB cartridge drive for my ETH Lilith.
Those zips are, despite their faults, the closests thing to it, still available in
plentiful supply. CF cards just doesn't seem right.
Switching from the original drive to IDE or ATAPi drives involves writing new bitslice
microcode. Difficult without the right spec, but as pointed out the 8070 spec and Linux
driver source do go a long way in explaining things. IDE version works now, with a
CHS-addressed harddisk. Atapi version still no luck
W.r.t. reliability : I killed a perfectly good ZIP disk by misaligning the LBA addresses.
Writing blocks on totally different addresses was not to its liking ( and noisy ) ,
although this should of course be possible. A corrected programs read and wrote
consecutive blocks without issue, on a new ZIP disk.
Jos
9:51 a.m.
New subject: one good ripoff deserves another / Iomega Zip's
On 04/21/2012 08:49 PM, Dave McGuire wrote:
They work very well as a sneakernet transfer medium to an E11 system.
I copied a lot of RK05 disks about 8 years ago with a Xylogics QBus RK05
controller booting RT11 from ZIP, then exporting files to Unix using E11's
host file system driver.
I made the same transition for the most part, but
kept my Zip disks around, and have recently started to collect some more. I'm planning
to use them on PDP-11s as removable boot media. -Dave
23 Apr
23 Apr
10:23 a.m.
On 4/20/2012 11:32 PM, Jeff Jonas wrote:
The Sharper Image pulled a similar ripoff during their
bankruptcy.
All gift cards were invalidated, but were then honored
ONLY if you paid an equal amount towards a purchase.
What a steal: turning perhaps $100 million of debt
from pre-purchased gift cards into a matching-grant program
to get another $100 million for their overpriced stuff :-/
And of course their margins are probably large enough, where the
matching cash actually pays for all of the products, and gift cards are
more or less thrown away.
You think are getting a deal, but in fact are just not overpaying as
much as you normally do.
Keith
4468
days inactive
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days old
24 comments
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aek＠bitsavers.org -
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cclist＠sydex.com -
dgriffi＠cs.csubak.edu -
ethan.dicks＠gmail.com -
fraveydank＠gmail.com -
geneb＠deltasoft.com -
jdr_use＠bluewin.ch -
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jules.richardson99＠gmail.com -
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mcguire＠neurotica.com -
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