History (1999): Iomega Clik! Shipping in USA

Starting in mid-December, Iomega began limited US shipments of its 40MB Clik! drives and disks.

The first drive configuration ($249) with parallel port and integrated battery is aimed at digital camera users, who can now copy the contents of a flash card onto the tiny magnetic disk.

Two more version for laptop computers should be released at the end of this month, the first (for $199) with a parallel port docking station and a PC card adapter, the second ($299) with, in addition, a flash card memory reader.

A 10-disk pack costs $100.

Until now, lomega only cited the names of companies that “plan” to use the small diskette. Now, with Varo Vision, they are upping the ante, declaring that the latter firm “has signed a letter of intent to build the Clik! drive into their Digital Pocket Solution (DPS) audio recorder/ player with an electronic address book and voice recorder.”

Each disk allows customers to save 40mn of MP3 compressed music files.

At the same time, Iomega has decided to join the Secure Music Initiative, an association aimed at the protection of copyright music in all digital formats. It explains that this is in order to develop Zip disks as a support for storing music files off the Web with a built-in system of copy protection.

However, the MP3 files currently circulating on the Web, with impressively high compression rates, are not in fact copy-protected, and can be saved with Clik!

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 132 on January 1999 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.