The Fascinating Story of Iomega, the Zip Drive Empire That Refused to Die and Lost to the USB Stick

In the mid-1990s, the floppy disk was running out of room, and Iomega had the answer. Launched in 1994, the Zip drive packed 100MB onto a cartridge that fit in your pocket, roughly seventy times the capacity of a standard floppy. It became a must-have for designers, students, and offices, turning a little-known Utah company that had started with the Bernoulli Box into one of the hottest names in personal computing. But the same success that made Iomega unstoppable also made it complacent, and a storm of cheaper, faster, and smaller rivals was already on the way. This video explores Iomega's journey from its early Bernoulli Box days to the explosive rise of the Zip drive and its high-capacity sibling, the Jaz drive. We break down the infamous "Click of Death" reputation crisis, the format war with SyQuest and the LS-120 SuperDisk, and the company's attempts to stay relevant with PocketZip, larger Zip formats, and later ventures under EMC and Lenovo. Finally, we look at how writable CDs, the USB flash drive, and eventually cloud storage made removable cartridges obsolete, and what Iomega's story teaches us about how quickly a dominant technology can disappear.