ZIP drives were too expensive for freshly post-Communist Czechia.
ZIP drives were too expensive for freshly post-Communist Czechia. A FDD would cost about USD 40-50, much more affordable than the ZIP drive with its 200 USD price tag. And the media were much cheaper, especially if you bought no-name diskettes for, say, USD 2-3. This way, you could discard a bad medium without feeling the economic pinch too much. Discarding a 20 USD ZIP medium would be quite painful. I think I only saw two computers with ZIP drives in the wild, so to say. Which created its own anti-network effects: if there is no expectation of the other party having a compatible drive, you will either have to do with floppies, or maybe carry an external HDD with you, but you won't use an exotic and expensive format. Pretty much the only plausible use was backup. I still believe that with a more aggressive price policy, ZIPs could have conquered a lot of territory in the 1990s. But 200/20 USD was just too much money to spend. Not just in the post-Soviet bloc, but almost everywhere in Asia, too. Big markets lost because of the cost, and therefore a chance to entrench the standard worldwide.
Posted by inglor_cz on Apr 19, 2026, 12:23 PM
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Raise real-world problems, find people facing the same issue, and discuss solutions.2,000 issues0 comments
pricing (Network)
there are tons of TLDs that are cheap I'm not even sure what you are offering after reading this, but cloud is an even harder sell becau...
> One can't expect that every driver package submission from every vendor is thoroughly vetted every time, this is a matter of trust and ...
Too expensive for a worse vehicle than the Model Y (with incentives, it was a >$20K difference).
Starlink only has 10 Million customers, too expensive for most countries already.
The U7 Lite only does 2x2 MIMO.
Iranians use VPNs simply because they want to access the internet.
> When you don't want the ads and privacy invasion, you don't visit the website.
A vantage point from a very long time ago: The big social media services are pining for the days of CompuServe and Prodigy.
ZIP drives were too expensive for freshly post-Communist Czechia.
ZIP drives were too expensive for freshly post-Communist Czechia. A FDD would cost about USD 40-50, much more affordable than the ZIP drive with its 200 USD price tag. And the media were much cheaper, especially if you bought no-name diskettes for, say, USD 2-3. This way, you could discard a bad medium without feeling the economic pinch too much. Discarding a 20 USD ZIP medium would be quite painful. I think I only saw two computers with ZIP drives in the wild, so to say. Which created its own anti-network effects: if there is no expectation of the other party having a compatible drive, you will either have to do with floppies, or maybe carry an external HDD with you, but you won't use an exotic and expensive format. Pretty much the only plausible use was backup. I still believe that with a more aggressive price policy, ZIPs could have conquered a lot of territory in the 1990s. But 200/20 USD was just too much money to spend. Not just in the post-Soviet bloc, but almost everywhere in Asia, too. Big markets lost because of the cost, and therefore a chance to entrench the standard worldwide.
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