TL ; DR

Floppy disks were tiny and slow

Zip drives in 1995 were around $200 and 100MB disk for about $20

CD-R burners in 1995 were $1000 and blank CD-R were about $15 each

By 1999 CD-R burners were around $125 and blank discs were around $1 and dropping fast. I remember when they were $0.10 for a 700MB disc in the 2000s

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bombcar 2 days ago | parent [-]

That was exactly the experience I had - there was a very narrow window where ZIP drives were the best option, but once you had some they hung around into the early 2000s.

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lizknope a day ago | parent [-]

I knew a bunch of Mac graphic design people that used Zip disks into the 2000's because they had to transfer huge files and the Zip discs were rewritable unlike CD-R. Rewriting a CD-RW is clunky compared to a Zip disk.

I actually bought one of these Panasonic PD Phase-change Dual drives in 1995. It was $500 and the cartridges were $30 for 650MB. I formatted them as ext2 and used the standard cp / mv / rm commands. This technology later evolved into the DVD-RAM standard. DVD-RW and DVD+RW were very different.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-change_Dual

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bombcar a day ago | parent [-]

Zip disks continued in their niche until USB sticks were large enough and reliable enough - because of that ability to use them as a disk - there were some packages that claimed to turn a CD-RW (or even a CD-R using append) into something that pretended to be editable, but they weren't great.

Macs did much better with removable drives for years since the users were used to "ejecting" the disk instead of just pulling it out.

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lizknope a day ago | parent [-]

Back around 1999 I tested some patches from Linux kernel hacker Jens Axboe that added packet writing support. This enabled DVD+RW discs to look like normal drives and you didn't have to make an ISO image and burn it.

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v6.1/cdrom/packet-writing.ht...

https://reactivated.net/software/packetwriting/

And in my googling for those links I find that Jens is still the block device maintainer and submitted a patch in 2025 to remove support for packet writing.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-To-Remove-pktcdvd

> "This driver has long outlived it's utility, and it's broken and unloved. The main use case for this was direct mount with UDF of cd-rw drives that required 32kb packets. It would collect writes into that size and write them out in multiples of that. That's not a common use case anymore, the world has moved on from those kinds of media. To make matters worse, it's actively breaking setups where it's not even required or useful."

	▲	bombcar a day ago \| parent [-]
		There was a pretty short window where it was more useful than just dedicating 700mb of cache on the hard drive, about the time that CDs could easily be larger than your hard drive.