2026-03-24 22:00:49
If you were anywhere near a computer in the mid-to-late 1990s, you almost certainly encountered a Zip drive. That distinctive purple peripheral, with its satisfying clunk as you slotted in a cartridge, was as much a fixture of the era as beige tower cases and CRT monitors. Iomega, the company behind it, went from an obscure Utah outfit to a multi-billion-dollar darling of Wall Street in the span of about two years. And then, almost as quickly, it all fell apart.
The story of Iomega is one of genuine engineering innovation and the fickle nature of consumer technology. As with so many other juggernauts of its era, Iomega was eventually brought down by a new technology that simply wasn’t practical to counter.
Iomega was founded in Utah, in 1980, by Jerome Paul Johnson, David Bailey, and David Norton. The company soon developed a novel approach to removable magnetic storage based on the Bernoulli effect. The Bernoulli Box arrived in 1982, which was a drive relying on PET film disks spun at 1500 RPM inside a rigid, removable cartridge. The airflow generated by the spinning disk pulled the media down toward the read/write head thanks to the eponymous Bernoulli effect. While spinning, the disk would float a mere micron above the head surface on a cushion of air. If the power cut out or the drive otherwise failed, the disk simply floated away from the head rather than crashing into it—a boon over contemporary hard drives for which head crashes were a real risk. The Bernoulli Box made them essentially impossible.
Early Bernoulli Box drives offered 10 MB and 20 MB of removable storage at a time when a fixed hard drive might hold 30 MB. Bernoulli Boxes were never really aimed at the home market, but found a devoted following among power users—publishers, CAD users, and anyone who needed to move serious amounts of data between machines. Sales were strong, and by 1983, Iomega hit the stock market running with an initial public offering raising $21.7 million.
As hard drive prices continued to dive over time due to economies of scale, though, the expensive Bernoulli Box became a less attractive proposition even despite its portability and greater storage. By 1986, Iomega had sold over 70,000 units and more than a million cartridges, but sales had peaked. The company had racked up serious debt and slow sales left the company saddled with undesirable inventory that wouldn’t move. Upgrades came thick and fast as Iomega pushed to keep up with the rapidly-changing storage market, which was enough to keep Iomega relevant if not flourishing. By 1993, the largest Bernoulli carts could hold 230 MB if you had a suitable model drive to read them, though the expensive drives mostly remained the domain of large corporate and government users.
The next phase for Iomega saw the company reach its greatest peak. The Zip drive launched in March 1995, and aimed to be a more affordable solution to high-capacity removable storage. It hit the market with 100 MB cartridges priced at $19.95 each, in an era when the standard 3.5” floppy could only hold 1.44 MB. For anyone regularly shuffling large files between home and office, or backing up a hard drive that might only hold a few hundred megabytes, it was a great leap forward. The iconic external model became popular in businesses, universities, and homes, and before long, OEMs like Apple, Dell, and Gateway started offering internal Zip drives as factory options. It became as close to a defacto standard for removable storage as a proprietary storage solution could ever be.
When the Zip drive hit, the sales numbers were staggering. Iomega’s revenue leapt from $362 million in 1995 to $1.2 billion in 1996. At its peak, Iomega was valued at nearly $7 billion. The company’s stock became a darling of investors addicted to massive gains. For a time, they appeared to be an unstoppable tech juggernaut, hanging on to a sizable chunk of the removable storage market without any obvious competitors on the horizon.
Iomega chased the success of the Zip drive with the even higher-capacity Jaz drive, which could store 1 GB in early models on hefty cartridges that contained rigid drive platters not dissimilar from those in contemporary hard disks. They were a great solution for power users moving what was then considered a lot of data, but their higher price meant they were never a consumer-grade darling like the cheaper Zip drive itself. The later “Clik” or “PocketZip” drive came along later in 1999, with a diminutive form factor and 40 MB disks. It too failed to gain the foothold of Zip, however, with a low install base limiting the usefulness of the removable format.
It wasn’t all smooth sailing, of course. A serious blow to Iomega’s reputation came from its own engineering. Some Zip drives developed a fault that came to be known as the “Click of Death.” The term referred to a clicking sound of the drive heads bouncing off their end stops when they became misaligned. In extreme cases, misaligned heads in a bad drive could damage disks, which would then damage the next drive they were used in. It was a mark against the technology that was supposed to be robust enough to be used as mobile storage. A class action lawsuit was filed in September 1998 and eventually settled in 2001, but the reputational damage remained.
It wasn’t the Click of Death debacle that doomed Iomega, though. It was merely the march of competing technologies that made its storage solutions less attractive over time. CD-R drives, which had been expensive curiosities in the mid-1990s, became dirt cheap just a few years later. By 2000, blank CD-Rs were retailing for as little as fifty cents each, and they held 650 MB a pop— more than six times the capacity of a Zip disk, on media that cost a fraction of the price and didn’t require proprietary hardware. They were so cheap, the write-once nature almost failed to matter. It was far more attractive to many customers to just burn another cheap CD that anyone could read than to go out and buy a Zip drive, an expensive 100 MB disk, and hope that whoever you were sending the disk to also had a drive that could read it. The CD-RW followed soon enough after, and writable DVDs would then take storage capacities well into the multi-gigabyte range. Zip drives jumped to 250 MB and then 750 MB, while the Jaz line was upgraded to 2 GB, but by and large, consumers were choosing writable optical discs over Iomega’s proprietary solutions.
USB flash drives would then prove to be the final nail in the coffin. They were compact and cheap, and required no special hardware whatsoever. You could just plug them into any USB port on any computer and your files were right there. They too would become cheap enough to be disposable, in a way that Iomega’s bespoke drives and mechanically-complicated cartridges would never be.
By 2002, the Jaz drive was dead, and the Zip drive followed soon after in 2003. It was CD burners that did the most damage, with the leap to DVD and the rising prominence of the USB drive that promised there would be no way back for removable magnetic cartridge media. These solutions were far less mechanically complex and a lot cheaper in terms of cost per megabyte.
Iomega was, at this point, a lumbering corporation with hundreds of employees, a dying product line, and a bleak future ahead. The company pivoted to other storage solutions, like selling rebranded optical disc drives, external hard drives, and network-attached storage devices. However, none of these products were particularly unique or competitive, as Iomega went from dominating a specific niche to fighting in a market segment where it had no particular competitive advantage. They became a small, sickly fish in a big pond, competing against dozens of other established storage brands that were far more renowned in their fields.
The end came in April 2008, when EMC Corporation announced plans to acquire Iomega for $213 million — a tiny fraction of the company’s peak valuation. EMC saw lingering value in Iomega’s small office and home office customer base, and kept the brand alive for a few years, slapping the Iomega name on NAS boxes and media adapters. These weren’t iconic products unique to the brand, so much as middle-of-the-road options that had no technical edge or promise to speak of. In 2013, EMC formed a joint venture with Lenovo called LenovoEMC. Iomega’s remaining products were rebadged accordingly, and the brand effectively ceased to exist. There was no reason to continue Iomega, because what it was built to do was simply no longer relevant in the modern marketplace.
The Iomega story is, in many ways, the archetypal cautionary tale of the consumer technology industry. In the 1990s, the company identified a genuine need—affordable, portable, high-capacity removable storage. It nailed this brief with the Zip drive, which propelled the company’s fortunes into the stratosphere. However, the entire business hinged on a product category that had a shelf life measured in years. Iomega simply couldn’t hold on to its edge in removable storage against so many competitors that were both cheaper and more practical. It’s the same death that Blockbuster died—fail to see the future, and you will inevitably succumb to it.
2026-03-24 19:00:06
Some people love fiddling with their 3D printers, others love printing. Some fiddle so they can spend more time printing, which is probably where this latest project comes in: an automated pressure advance calibration tool by [markniu].
Most of us don’t take enough care with pressure advance (PA). But if you want absolutely perfect prints, its something you should be calibrating for every type filament in your collection. Some would argue, ideally every individual spool. While that sort of dialing in can be fun, it takes away from actually running off prints. Bambu printers automate PA by scanning the usual sort of calibration print, but that’s still a very indirect measurement. Why not, just advance the filament, and measure the pressure at the nozzle directly? That is what PA is meant to account for, after all: the pressure of the plastic in the hotend causing oozing and blobbing at corners.
[mark]’s solution comes very close to a direct measurement. It uses a strain gauge that sits directly on top of the heatbreak, with the sound logic that the strain there experienced will be directly proportional to the pressure inside, at least along the axis of flow. Instead of filling half the bed with lines, the calibration process instead is a ‘printer poop’ style extrusion that doesn’t take nearly as long, and seems to save plastic, too. Since this puts a strain gauge in your hotend, you also get the bonus of being able to use it for bed leveling if you should so desire.
[mark] is claiming sub-90 second calibration — as you can see in the demo video embedded below — versus over seven minutes for the indirect calibration print. The value is plugged directly into Klipper, assuming you configured everything correctly, which should be easy enough looking at the instructions on the GitHub.
2026-03-24 16:00:17
Makers and hardware hackers have been collecting disposable vapes for some time now, usually to salvage their batteries or the unique displays many models now come with. But you can also repurpose them for other ends, such as playing music. [Becky Stern]’s vape synth is a perfect example of this.
The build started with an ElfBars BC5000 vape. [Becky] notes there may be similar models under different names out there that would work just as well. The vape is effectively gutted for parts, with the LiPo cell, USB charging board, and the low-pressure sensor the main things that remain. These parts are combined with a drop-in 555 synthesizer circuit complete with speaker, which has its pitch controlled by a series of six photoresistors. When the low pressure sensor is triggered by inhalation, the 555 circuit is triggered, and operates at a pitch depending on the resistance of the photoresistor stack.
The output of the vape synth is kind of shrill, and frankly a little bit annoying — which is somehow rather fitting for what it is. If you want to make a better-sounding synth at home, we’ve featured such projects, you’re just unlikely to fit them entirely within the housing of a disposable vape.
2026-03-24 13:00:26
In the blue corner, we have the VENUS FLYTRAP! In the red corner, we have the underdog of the century, AN ENTIRE PARTICLE ACCELERATOR. Yes, you read that right. When you have a particle accelerator, it’s only second nature to throw anything you can into it. That’s why [Electron Impressions] put a poor fly-eating trap into their accelerator.
The match-up isn’t quite as arbitrary as it might seem at first. The flytrap’s main mechanism of trapping and digesting insects relies heavily on intracellular ion movement. Many cells along the inside of the trap have hair-activated calcium channels that respond to a fly landing on its surface. This ion movement then creates an action potential, which propagates along the entire surface, triggering closing. As the potential moves across different cells, other ions leave and create osmotic pressure. This pressure is what creates the mechanical movement.
Of course, this makes it no surprise when the plant finds itself under the ionizing radiation that every single head closes at once. While this is a cool demonstration, there is a slight side effect of killing every single cell by ripping apart the trap’s DNA.
Well, who would have guessed that the underdog accelerator would have won… Anyways, the DNA being ripped apart is far from ideal for repeatability. If you want to learn more about genetic features that SHOULD be repeated, then make sure to check out the development of open-source insulin!
2026-03-24 10:00:11
Supercapacitors rely mostly on double-layer capacitance to bridge the divide between chemical batteries and traditional capacitors, but they come with a number of weaknesses. Paramount among these are their relatively low voltage of around 2.7 V before their electrolyte begins to decompose, as well as their relatively high rates of self-discharge. Here a new design using lignin-derived porous carbon electrodes and a fluorinated diluent was demonstrated by [Shichao Zhang] et al., as published in Carbon Research, that seems to address these issues.
Most notable are the relatively high voltage of 4 V, an energy density of 77 Wh/kg and a self-discharge rate that’s much slower than that of conventional supercapacitors. In comparison with these supercapacitors, these demonstrated versions are also superior in terms of recharge cycles with 90% of capacity remaining after 10,000 cycles, which together with their much higher energy density should prove to be quite useful.
This feat is accomplished by using lignin as the base for the carbon electrodes to make a highly porous surface, along with the new electrolyte formulation consisting of alithium salt (LiBF4) dissolved in sulfolane with TTE as a non-solvating diluent. The idea of using lignin-derived carbon for such a purpose has previously been pitched by [Jia Liu] et al. in 2022 and [Zhihao Ding] in 2025, with this seemingly one of the first major applications we may be seeing.
Although the path towards commercialization from a lab-assembled prototype is a rough one, we may be seeing some of these improvements come to supercapacitors near you sooner rather than later.
2026-03-24 07:00:08
The Z80 has been gone a couple of years now, but it’s very much not forgotten. Still, the day when new-old-stock and salvaged DIP-40 packaged Z80s will be hard to come by is slowly approaching, and [eaw] is going to be ready with the picoZ80 project.
You can probably guess where this is going: an RP2350B on a DIP-40 sized PCB can easily sit on the bus and emulate a Z80. It can do so with only one core, without breaking a sweat. That left [eaw] a second core to play with, allowing the picoZ80 to act as a heck of an accelerator, memory expander, USB host, disk emulator– you name it. He even tossed in an ESP32 co-processor to act as a WiFi, Bluetooth, and SD-card controller to use as a virtual, wirelessly accessible disk drive.
The onboard ram that comes with an RP2350B would be generous by 1980s standards, but [eaw] bumped that up with an 8 MB SPRAM chip–accessed in 64 pages of 64 kB each, naturally. If more RAM than a very pricey hard drive wasn’t luxury enough, there’s also 16 MB of flash memory available. That’s configured to store ROM images that are transferred to the RAM at boot– the virtual Z80 isn’t grabbing from the flash at runtime in [eaw]’s architecture, because apparently there are limits to how much he wants to boost his retro machines.
If somehow you missed it, the venerable Z80 only hit EOL in 2024, so supplies won’t be drying up any time soon. This hack is really more about the quality-of-life addons this allows. Come back in a decade, and we’ll see if the RP2350 lasts longer than the stack of NOS Z80s.
