The Beauty of Zip and Magneto Optical Disks
The Beauty of Zip and Magneto Optical Disks [OPINION]
Around 20 years ago, I worked for a company building device drivers, for DVD-RAM drives, for pre-MacOS X Macintosh’s and Windows 2000-era PCs.What are DVD-RAM drives, you ask?  Well.  Imagine a DVD that you stick in a caddy (like CD-ROMs in Ye Olden Times) that you then load into the slot on the drive.  You can then use the DVD-RAM disk… just as you would a hard drive, or a floppy, or a flash drive.  Delete, copy, move files however you like.The speeds were not exactly peppy (to put it mildly), but the storage space was outstanding.  And there was something magical — special — about having a DVD-RAM disk inside a caddy.  It felt good to hold.My favorite part about that job was the relatively gargantuan stack (or, rather, stacks) of DVD-RAM disks and caddies that filled my office.  (A dimly lit office, with the glow of my table lamp bouncing off a stack of storage caddies sitting next to my CRT monitor… be still my beating heart.)I suppose I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for removable storage formats where each disk had its own case.  Tape drives.  Jaz drives.  DVD-RAM drives.  Even plain old 5.25” and 3.5” floppies.  I just dig them.But there are two types of removable drives — ones way past their prime — that have an aesthetic which I am just absolutely crazy about: Zip Drives and Magneto Optical Drives.Zip drives, we all know about.  Those 100MB, Iomega beauties.Sure, their reliability wasn’t top notch.  (See: Zip Drive Click of Death)  And, depending on your model, the speed wasn’t necessarily anything to write home about, either.My first Zip drive was a parallel port model.  It took roughly 2 million years to copy 100MB of files over to a single Zip drive.  Give or take.But, still.  In a time of 3.5” floppies, they held 100 MB!  100!  MB!  And they were… THICK.  They felt good to hold.  A stack of them was a gratifying sight.  A box filled with 5 or more Zip disks was oddly appealing.  Simply to gaze upon.I used to meticulously write (or draw) on my Zip disk labels.  Something we just don’t do anymore, in the age of USB flash drives.  I truly miss labels.Yeah, there’s no doubt about it.  Zip disks were cool.  And their look still holds distinct appeal.But, if I’m being honest, what I really loved — and wished I had back in the day — were those Magneto Optical drives.The first machines to really use the Magneto Optical drives were those from NeXT.  Which makes them rather cool right there.They were, physically, not much different than a 3.5” or 5.25” floppy disk.  Same dimensions.  But instead of storing 1.44 MB… they stored (often) either 128 or 230 MB.And knowing that these drives could store that much within the same size of a 3.5” floppy made them, somehow, magical.  And that magic made them extra beautiful.Once again, adorning them with custom labels — either writing on them with a pen or, as seen in these screenshots, creating custom printed labels — simply added to the magic.  Like their Zip disk cousins, a stack of 3.5” Magneto Optical disks… well that is a sight to behold.Can you imagine a small pile of those bad mama jamas sitting next to a NeXTcube?  On your wooden desk?  With a small table lamp?  And a nice, clicky, mechanical keyboard?I know, right?Sure.  Even a whole stack of Zip or Magneto Optical disks can’t compare to the storage space (or speed) of a USB Flash Drive or a MicroSD card.I’ll grant you that.  From both a storage space and speed point of view, we’ve sure come a long way.But a small pile of thumb drives or SD cards?  Bah.  Just doesn’t hold a candle to the beauty of a stack or box of those old disks.  They were, and are, simply beautiful.