From: Randal Whittle (rwhittle_at_usa.net)
Date: Thu Aug 07 1997 - 23:45:19 EDT
At 03:54 AM 7/31/97 -0500, Fabian Rodriguez wrote:
>Hi again,
>
>I went to Compucentre today here in Sherbrooke and noticed a "Shark"
removable ... 250MB disks (3 for CAN$180), drive for ~CAN$400, the guy tol
us they had only sold one...
>
>Yet it is about 2/3 the size of ZIP, plus it doesnt need any ext. power
(draws power from keybd), I must say, very "design"...
>
>Shark any?
>
>os. I hate carrying the whole ZIP stuff around.. although it sure beats
any1.44 mb floppy :)
There's a good article on removable storage in the current PC/Computing.
Basically, it gave the Shark some reasonably high marks. But the real
issue that makes the Zip win hands down is that it is the closest thing to
a "standard" as there is in the industry. So many people have them that
you can reasonably expect to send someone a Zip disk with stuff on it and
they'll be able to read it--or at least they know someone that can. This
is the first time anyone has been able to do that with anything that holds
more than a floppy.
If the Shark had come along a couple years earlier and maintained the
cheap media (per MB) that the Zip has, it might be the standard. But its a
little late to the game and therefore will be relegated to relative obscurity.
SyQuest had their chance--I used their 105 MB removable (not the 135 MB
that competed with the zip early on) and later their 270 MB removable
(which I still have), but the media cost *way* too much. With Zip disks as
low as $15 a piece and sold in packages like floppies (not to mention
*looking* like floppies), they're hard to resist.
-------
Randal J. Whittle whittle_at_usc.edu (213) 740-7775
Director, Electronic Commerce Program
Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Thu Jan 23 2003 - 09:53:40 EST