History (1997): Battle Rages on Between Iomega Zip and Imation SuperDisk

Imation had decided to change the name of its 120 Mbyte LS-120 diskette to SuperDisk. A simple name change will not seriously alter the outcome of the bloody battle that is currently raging between the SuperDisk and Zip over who will replace 1.44MB floppy disks.

Impossible to guess at this point who will win the day, or whether there will even be a single victor, or if yet another product will triumph in the end.

Rumors have been circulating recently about a new project at Sony, one of the pioneers of FDDs, which hasn’t come up with anything new in this area recently, for a 200MB high density floppy disk. At the same time, however, we learned that Sony Information Technologies of America, a divisional company of Sony Electronics, has decided to include Zip as a standard feature in its PCV-130 and 150 computers.

Between Imation and lomega, there is a rush to release the most press releases, each one announcing a new customer, with the customer then releasing its own announcement.

More recently, the two companies have been tearing up the terrain in notebooks. OR Technology has led a trump with an LS-120 drive adapted for notebooks, only 12.7mm thick compared to 15mm for the Zip.

But Iomega is already working on a Zip product of the same thickness, although progress has been held up by a motor problem.

One interesting note is that a relatively unknown firm, Winstation Systems Corp., has perfected a SuperDisk drive with a SCSI interface in internal and external versions, expected to be available in 3Q97.

For its part, OR Technology, with Phoenix Technologies and SystemSoft, unveiled BIOS technology that enables the LS-120, a drive to serve as the boot drive in notebook computers that use Windows 95, NT and DOS.

NEC Computer Systems, a division of Packard Bell, has decided to begin integrating slimline LS-120 drives in all future modular notebook product families, beginning this summer with the Versa 6000 and 6200 series. In a separate announcement, NEC said it will offer this floppy drive as a standard feature in certain Versa notebook computers. Curiously, the month before, NEC Corp. of Japan signed a licensing agreement with Iomega under which NEC was granted non-exclusive worldwide rights to manufacture and market Zip drives.

On the Zip side, Chicony has signed on to integrate an internal model as an optional feature in its 97x series of notebooks.

The same goes for Hitachi PC Corporation with its laptops, VisionBook Pro and Elite, as well as Micron for its TransPort XKE series of notebooks.

Each time, both camps in their turn proudly vaunt the list of manufacturers that have opted for their respective floppy drives. For Zip, which has shipped 6 million drives thus far, the list includes Apple, Compaq, Dell, Chicony, CNF Technologies, Gateway, HP, Hitachi PC, IBM, Micron, Motorola, Packard Bell NEC, Power Computing, Sony, Umax, Unisys and VST Technologies. For the SuperDisk (no volume figures available yet, but no doubt they are behind Zip’s, which was launched earlier, in March 1995), they include Compaq, EB, Hitachi-Maxell, FujitsullCL, Mitsubishi Electric, Packard Bell NEC, Precision Instruments, Samsung, Siemens Nixdorf and Vobis.

This article is an abstract of news published on ≠114 on July 1997 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.