The Zip drive is a medium-capacity removable disk storage system, introduced by Iomega in late 1994. Originally it had a capacity of 100MB, but later versions increased this to first 250MB and then 750MB. The format became the most popular of the super floppy type products but never reached the point where drives were seen almost everywhere. The zip brand was also used for an external CD writer known as the Zip-CD but despite the name this had nothing technically in common with the zip disks.

Zip drives have been made with a variety of interfaces to the PC. Internal drives have been made with both IDE and SCSI interfaces. External drives were first made with parallel and SCSI interfaces.USB Zip drives arrived years later.

ZIP Drives are pretty well obsolete now they were replaced by smaller cheaper re-writeable cd and then by the faster memory sticks. They are here mainly because your text books are the syllabus still refers to them. I haven't actually seen one in five years and its probably 7 years since I actually used one.