> Why Zip drives dominated the 90s, then vanished almost overnight

This is such an odd take to me.

I sold and supported computers in the 1990s. Outside of a few industries, such as desktop publishing, Zip was not popular. The vast majority of computer owners never owned a Zip drive, unlike a floppy or soon to be CDROM.

In fact, I sold far more QIC-80 tape drives for backups than Zip drives.

Zip also didn't vanish overnight, it simple never caught on with most people. However, in the industries that used them, they hung on for a while.

There were some niche use cases too.

For awhile, the Ontario Health Insurance Program allowed physicians to submit their billing in person via zip drive. I remember depositing the disks for my parents (funny the things one remembers)

This was the time between paper billing and digital submissions.