The Zip disks were much more robust than the Jazz drives. Our university had both in some departments during the era. The Zip disks lasted quite a while and did a good job (occasional failures). The Jazz drives had to be used on a perfectly stable surface because tapping them while they ran was a quick way to crash the head and destroy the disk.

Art departments, audio work, and larger data sets were kept on Zip disks. Much of the network was still Cat 3 wire (or even thicknet) with 10/100 hubs. Many of the computers being used couldn’t move 100 MB with any real speed and many of them still had 1 GB internal hard disks. Burning a CD was still risky because Win95/98’s scheduler sucked donkey balls and they’d fail to burn properly. Early CD blanks were $5-$13 each, so it was a big deal to burn a lot of them.

Also, there was no (or very little) centralized network file stores around campus. Most of the office workers had no place to even copy files to for sharing. You’d use the Zip disks and floppies for nearly everything if you couldn’t get the windows file sharing to work directly from one desktop to another.

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.