News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Why Zip drives dominated the 90s, then vanished almost overnight. Parent comment

Re:Why Zip drives dominated the 90s, then vanished almost ov... by swiftcoder on Sunday April 19, 2026 @09:21AM (#47824131)
> but USB before the 2000s was pretty bad

Indeed. So bad that no one apart from Apple would have tried to go all-in on it. I doubt things like USB mice and keyboards would ever have happened if Apple didn't give it a kick in the behind

Firewire was indeed a nice addition when that came along, but it always remained the domain of pricey high-bandwidth devices.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Why Zip drives dominated the 90s, then vanished almost ov... by sublinear on Sunday April 19, 2026 @09:32AM (#47824200)
I did some more digging to find out that the infamous BSOD demo with Bill Gates on stage was meant to show off plug and play on Windows 98. It was caused by a USB scanner.

This happened 4 months before the release date of the first iMac.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=IW7Rqwwth84

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Why Zip drives dominated the 90s, then vanished almost ov... by swiftcoder on Monday April 20, 2026 @09:23AM (#47833977)
Yeah, I mean, I don't disagree with any of this, I just don't think any vendor in the PC world was prepared to rip the PS/2 and serial ports off their motherboards, and tell all the peripheral manufacturers to go take a hike
[ Parent | on HN ]