those damn disks never seemed to come down in price, I imagine because no one else besides Iomega was allowed to produce the disks.
Iomega was intentionally selling the Zip drives at or below cost, and was selling the disks for a relatively healthy margin.
The intent was to, essentially, simulate the razor blade/ink printer markets. Theory theory was that with the drives and disks priced just so, they'd be able to generate near infinite demand.
In reality, the costs for the disks were high enough that the storage market for '90s data-hoarders didn't really materialize the way Iomega thought it did.
The other thing is Iomega spent a lot of money getting Zip into as many retailers and pre-built systems as possible. It was a successful plan to build something that defacto ended up succeeding floppies until USB flash disks became possible/reasonable in 2003, but.
As far as disk production, Fuji and I believe possibly Imation (I'd have to check) produced their own. Fuji was building the internal magnetic media, so Iomega licensed the rest of the cartridge design back to them.
This is moderately ironic because Iomega made at least some of the money that made it possible for Zip to exist and for Syquest to stop existing by (along with Nomai) cloning SyQuest 44/88/200 cartridges, due to a technicality in the way SyQuest's patent was written and the actual physical design of the way their drives and cartridges were built.
The other frustrating thing is that Iomega had better technologies, but Zip is just what ended up being cheap enough to sell like that. Even worse is that ultimately MO was actually cheaper per megabyte than Zip if you had more than just a couple disks worth of data.
just because that is what I had back in the day, for nostalgic reasons.
Fun and nostalgia is pretty much the only reason to use any of these formats for anything. SCSI2SD v5.5 is arguably better and more reliable as a removable or swappable media format for any kind of "actual use".
I picked up an EZ-135 and a Bernoulli 230, mostly because they're Neat. I have some Zip stuff, but I dislike it a lot, aesthetically, mostly because I believe Iomega behaved very badly as a company.
