This obscure disk format had NO CHANCE at success! 

Yes! I bought one of these back in 1997. It worked great for about five months and then died. I called their online tech support and a wonderful woman agreed to ship me a replacement at no cost the same day and didn't even need me to send back the defective unit. I thought that was excellent customer service...until I read that the company shut down about a week later. No wonder she was kind enough to send me a new unit without worrying about the return, she knew her days were numbered (the second unit also died within six months).

Considering how drives of this era randomly failed, I can see how a no-name format could deter people from buying. Zip drives may have been slow, but it’s fairly easy to replace a bad drive.

Love hearing about these "super floppies", the transition between floppies and CD/flash memory. All these obscure formats.

I did tech support for this product! The biggest problem was the AT keyboard power adapter. While the majority of AT motherboards were tolerant of removing and replacing the keyboard without powering off the machine, some were not, and most importantly, the spec did not require them to be, and so, despite having copious warnings about shutting down the machine before removing the AT keyboard and installing the adapter, it was still a common enough call that we got in support that someone fried their motherboard because they unplugged the keyboard while it was on.

While Zip drives werent ubiquitous, they were the closest thing to it. The drives and disks were relatively cheap, that even a teenager at the time like me, could afford them. Plus they were portable, if not conveniently so. In order to beat out the Zip drive, you really had to make something that was significantly better in multiple ways, which no manufacturer accomplished until CD writers became mainstream.

I worked in the ISP/Telco space during this period. The storage wars were madness. A true blast from the past. Thanks for the PTSD ;)

I remember a big part of not pushing for anything like a zip drive on our computers for my friend group back then was; we all had cd-roms on our computers already, and we knew that cd burners existed. We were all just waiting for the burners to come down in price. It was typical to see zip-style drives being able to store 100-300 megabytes back then, but CDs could store upwards of 650MB, IIRC.

That disk format was a day late and a dollar short with releasing years after the Zip, Jaz, and other disk drives. Also by 1997, they were starting to come out with flash memory cards that were far smaller and durable!

Where I live there were basically no other options for external storage for the common user except floppies, we only got writable CD-ROMS and USB flash storage by the end of the nineties. We heard about zip and jaz drives but nobody I knew had one. So, I'm thankful that you (and others) tell these stories about failed but interesting stuff from those times!

Glad I didn't invest into this platform in the 90's and instead chose to wait it out for 512GB SD cards to hit the market 25 years later.

I like to think I kept very up to date with all hardware in 1997 but... this one escaped me, today is the first time I have ever seen it. I will say that iomega in particular had excellent marketing at this time, while they were a 'known' brand they were still making a new foray into the consumer market where the brand wasn't so well known but their advertisements, articles and even packaging were all very well thought out. They seemed to very easily slot into the role the market had opened up, I admit those blue drives just had something cool about them despite me really having no real use for such a limited format. The only true competitor I remember was the more open LS-120 format which did appear in a lot of pre-builts and had a lot of advantages.

I love videos like this that cover failed technology! In 1997, I was an avid reader of _Byte_ and I was doing a PC repair certificate at the local Community College, yet I was utterly unaware of this product.

6:29 I have two Castlewood Orb drives (an internal and an external) and a bunch of discs. 2.2GB of storage per disc made them a great choice at the time

Do you remember the Iomega click! drives? They were very similar the Avatar Shark drives. Clik! Disks held 40mb, but there may have been other capacities I never saw. I still have a few of the disks laying around, but no drive.

6:32 - Oh wow. I had totally forgotten about the Orb drive - that b-roll brought back some memories of owning one!

Learning about older technology, especially this more obscure stuff, is always cool, great video! 🙏

I evaluated this drive tech in the later 1990s for HP (former Colorado Memory Systems division). It was very fragile, and the self destruct “feature” was discovered in the first 2 days of testing. HP was having the typical large company conflicts with fears of entering a consumer market would damage their high margin WORM drive business. In the end, HP went with the CD-R technology and sourced a drive from Philips. Have you heard of the COMBYTE dual drive (floppy & backup tape drive, Fort Collins, CO) or OnStream (backup drive based on the Philips DCC Tech, Louisville/Lafayette! CO)? Both were storage companies started by former Colorado Memory employees.

All these formats battled it out in the ads and articles in those thick 1990's computer magazines. All are long gone, including the magazines.

Portable storage for the general PC and Mac using public back in the 1990s was like the Wild West. I was familiar with floppies, Zip and Jaz drives but I didn't own the latter two because they cost too much and I didn't really need "that" much storage. I was so glad to see CDs and smaller storage cards become the norm not long later. Never heard of this company nor its product though. Thanks for the intro, I love this channel!

These would be perfect if they used modern hard drive platter densities! We need this as a passive data storage medium. Theres no good way to transfer larger untrusted files to an offline sandbox that doesn't make the transferring medium untrusted afterwards since you can't be sure they were erased, other than tapes or floppies. I'd buy it. Someone open source the drives and we'll shove modern platters in it.

Still using CD's DVD's and Floppy disc's in 2023! But I also Stream, and have Sirius XM Radio. Being a boomer, I take advantage of all technologies.

This is some GREAT technology for it's time!

I remember this period well when there were so many disk formats available and I had trouble figuring out how to deal with longevity for format. So glad this is no longer an issue for consumers.

Thats a nice story with some great research. I would share some of my experience. I have 2 drives and several disks, and they were awesome. They really were portable hard drives of the time. Not only could I share files between my desktops and laptops, I could run program executables directly on them. Also video files could be played directly from the disks, so in general I accessed all files directly without needing to copy them to the internal storage. You cant really do that with Zip or other floppy formats as the load times would be impractical. Jazz and other removable hard drive formats were more expensive, bulky, and usually not compatible with parallel ports and DOS. I left my parallel cable connected to my main desktop and swapped the drive to the pccard cable for laptop, until i got the second drive so i just swapped discs. This lasted me a while until the storage size was not enough, by which time usb thumb drives already became mainsteam. Oh and the disks came in protective rubber cases. I always stored my disks in them as soon as they were out of the drive.

Great video Colin. Happy holidays!

they had one of these in the multi-media classroom my sophomore year of high school back in 2001. the teacher liked to collect old and discontinued peripherals and storage mediums like this. he was one of my favorite teacher and taught me everything from 3d animation using Strata 3d and Maya to video and photo editing and even screen printing. I took his classes every year

I had a couple of ZIP drives back in the day. Since the disks were mainly used for school work, it made sense to use the same disk format that the Macs in the school's computer lab used. I think that was a big leg-up to ZIP: OEM integration, and from Apple of all companies too.

Love your videos :D I really love retro Tech and PCs

it's a shame too, cuz damn those are cool names! how the hell did they blow the marketing that badly when they knew enough to use names like avatar and shark!

I love this channel! Have a good weekend!

You should try to find any of the people involved and ask them for an interview. The info should be available in public company registries.

I remember opting for a tape drive. The format was slow, but established. Tape drives still hold up for pure data backups.

I remember using Zip on early digital video editing stations in the late 90's

Zip was of course notorious for the click of death. Its interesting though how long the floppy lasted and how shortly all its attempted replacements lasted with in the magnetic storage medium. the late 90s and early 2000s just brought such rapid progress. Its remarkable how fast we went from mechanical media to flash memory around that time period.

I just discovered the Avatar Shark recently and ordered a NOS drive from Amazon (Parallel). I would really like to fabled SCSI version. During college I had first a Zip drive, the Jazz drive which were godsends. I never heard of Avatar until now. Thanks for the video. I have added it to my collection. Now if I could just find a Sony/Fujitsu HiFD drive! Keep up the good work.

I have never heard of it. I was into SyQuest EZ 135 drives as my choice vs Zip. Eventually I switched to Zip 250 because the later SyQuest drives (EZ 235, SyJet, SparQ) had hardware issues and a high failure rate. Those drives were not as solid as earlier models.

Despite the abundance of options, non of them became extremely popular or a de-facto global "standard". Eventually CD-Rs swept the floor with competition. But during most of the 1990s, the average consumer didn't really have multimedia content of their own to store on removable medias. 1.44 MB floppy disks were sufficient for most people...

Great video! As you say the zip drive with its 100mb disks was just the right size for most home users. Around the mid 90's a lot of computers came with 420mb hard drives so zip drives were perfect.

I lived through the 90's and do not recall this format either. Must have been very obscure.

Very nice and informative video.

I had the Zip drive as a teacher, I had a desktop on my teacher's desk and a desktop at home, which was where my Zip drive came into use. I had a Syquest HD, but never heard anything about Avatar's products. Now I see why. I think it came at the wrong time and their focus on trying to be a part of a desktop, and not developing the Laptop version sooner and lack of good advertising killed it. If it had been say 4-5 years later!

A well presented video, i found it really interesting

I am surprised ive never heard of or seen one of these things. Thx for the education. Cheers.

I live in Silicon Valley (and have lived here for around 10 years now) so I love learning about these lesser-known Silicon Valley companies. Thanks for the great video!

I had one of these on my Compaq Contura 430. It was very quick with the PCMCIA card and I ended up buying lots of disks and drives from ebay years ago. I lost my Avatar shark stuff in a move, but it was a fantastic piece of kit, the only better piece of equipment I had was my Bantam Backpack with the sound card!

When I was at high school (1994) we started using Zip Disks in replacement to 1.44’s. They were fantastic, I don’t think I ever had one fail on me and they were chucked around in backpacks and pockets etc… the Zip disk itself is the reason I then chose to use MiniDisc for my music. CD’s whilst very prevalent, always seemed inconvenient!!

I was using zip drives at the time and a friend of mine got one of these and I loved it. I was just getting into doing portable stuff and dragging a laptop around and I just thought it was super awesome . You did show them or drive and that's what I got into after the Zip drive

Damn this one escaped me, will have to keep my eyes open so i can grab one for my collection! Great video :D

imagine you and techmoan make a "museum of forgotten media" while I know a repository already exists

Neat drive. I had a zip and an LS120 back in that era. I preferred the LS due to its backwards compatibility.

I remember seeing this in our family business’ office. I was a kid back then. I did not see these last long and only saw this used like once or twice.

I still have two of these drives with several discs. The last time I used them they worked fine. I should see if I can get them running again to see what I saved on the discs.

I'm proud to be from Milpitas. The tiny city among Silicon Valley giants, that has fostered more tech start-ups than you would ever guess, and has held the suppliers for many of the largest corporations. 😅 Awesome to see one tech tidbit from here.

I love this period in computers. The mid 90s were a kind of wild west gold rush. Floppies had gotten too small and re-writable CDs and flash storage weren't a thing yet, so we have all these kinda odd formats in between. Most only lasted a few years, many were rather obscure. The Windows on an X86 CPU paradigm hadn't achieved complete dominance yet. Everything was still possible and it was easy to get your finger in the pie.

3:56: At first, right when you opened the disk's head slot, it looked floppy to me, but with a space only for swinging heads like modern hard disk drives use, which is what the Iomega Clik!/PocketZip disk and drive are (making Clik!/PZ the only floppy drive I had ever heard of to use swingers, which I only found out about maybe about a month ago of this video), but then when you put it in the drive it looked to have that more mirror-like finish like modern hard disks.

I was a computer nerd in the 90s. I used to read all the computer magazines. Went to grey market computer stores in the Bay Area to get white box (oem) components. That was how I got an Iomega Zip for my PC for only $99. Never heard of this. When I went to college for computer stuff at SFSU they were standardized on the Syquest 270. Which was expensive for the time. I never got around to getting my own Syquest drive! I just went to the open computer lab and hoped the machine with both formats wasn't in use. All our professors at the time were telling us WORM or something similar would be the next big thing. Nobody foresaw the USB thumb drive thing or SD cards.

I remember EZ-Drive because we sued them for trademark infringement.

I had one of these. The Iomega "click of death" was a big motivator.

I remember seeing adverts for this drive. But I often confused it with Iomega Click. So many formats before USB thumb drives finally managed to replace floppy disks.

Hello! I had one of this Avatar Shark about early 2000´...In Argentina was a "Pre-pendrive" time, so those 250 mb represented a huge capacity!!

Can't belive there were so many of these external data storage formats. All fighting for dominance at one stage. Yet now all obsolete in favour of high capacity USB sticks, SD/microSD memory cards and even portable hard drives.

5:17 I Like the "Cover Your Assets" Ad from Shark! If I saw that ad My Current age (21) in '97), I would buy their format!

cool video please please make another video about your custom built retro PC!!!

I bought one at the time, rarely used it, but it's still around somewhere in storage.

The fierce competition in the 90s for a successor to floppy discs was crazy, Lol.

Oh. I only knew of few transitional formats (well, by few, almost 10 probably) between floppies and cd and cd-r/rw, never had any, but saw them in few places (mostly magazines really), in middle to late 90s. But it looks like there were way way more formats than I could image, probably close to 60, by dozens of companies. Fascinating. Fierce competition, a lot of lost history and engineering efforts. Not always because the technically better product won, but due to many more factors.

Does your drive work? I'm curious what it sounds like.

I had Zip, Jazz and Minidisk all before I was 13 Growing up with a CTO in the early 90s was rad

In high school my mate used to avoid handing in homework by pulling out a Zip disk and saying “here it is” - he knew our teachers did not have Zip drives. I thought that was very clever at the time

I loved my Shark drive! I think I still have it in a box somewhere.

Even though I had forgotten the product, I sure remember that advertising campaign. I saw it when I was twelve (yes, I subscribed to PCMag), and it's fair to say that young me found the ad with the guy at 5:17 very interesting.

I bought one of these when they came out it was great.

Way back in the late 80s I worked at HDD manufacturer - they were for laptops and we tested them via the parallel port, which meant with a minimal amount of hardware you could easily cart around 10MB in your shirt pocket. When I brought up the potential of marketing the drives as portable high-capacity memory I was told by the engineers that it was "the dumbest idea they'd ever heard of."

I remember a drive that used 2.5 in hard drives but without the electronics. I do not know who made these, but at the time it seemed to be that it would not save enough cost to make it worthwhile. As a 2.5 in drive of any capacity could plug into a PATA port, but the number of heads, data rate, modulation, motor drive etc would be really specific to a single model year.

Never heard of this before and I had a Zip drive in the day. The design language of the Avatar looks a lot like that of Iomega btw.

Yep-installed base. I worked in New York design in the 1990’s and we used syquest and jaz drives, but more importantly every type-house and printer we worked with also used both these formats. Your video is the first time I’ve heard of Avatar and, as you say I don’t see any compelling reason for anyone to switch.

I had one of these! But still ended up using zip disks 95% of the time. The hardware itself feels pretty neat and interesting, but also felt more fragile than zip disks.

Wow-I was in DTP in the 90's & I've NEVER heard of this!

Worked at University...some faculty swore by these things, others swore at them. I worked support, and our 'solution' to the reliability issue was to buy 40 'spares', and swap them out as needed. That way I could fuss around with the NeXT computers and their magneto-optical storage system...when I wasn't fixing the tape-reader on the PDP-11....

I bought one in 97 as well, a long with a IBM Aptiva. I was astonished it could hold a a whopping 250mb per disc. It worked well and never really had a problem with it. I also had the Sony floppy disc digital camera.

5:07: That article messed up: "The Zip drive will replace the floppy drive in forthcoming Micron Millenia PCs." * The Zip drive *IS* a floppy drive.

I found avatar disks and drives on ebay. are there any adaptor parallel port to usb for use on modern pcs?

I had the iomega portable. 100 meg doesn't sound like much, but my AT&T lappy only had an 80 meg HD.

Having lived through that period, I remember the allure of high capacity removable media. However, all of them suffered from reliability problems - which made them less useful for anything other than short-term temporary storage. Personally I went with a QIC-80 tape drive for backups until recordable CD was available. Now-days external hard disks are cheap and can be accessed by any modern computer.

Even Jaz was mostly eclipsed by Zip drives. Once it became clear this would be a format war everyone just seemed to gravitate to the most common one. I recall people often complaining that we had chosen wrong and some other less favored format would have been better but most were aware that the future was going to be solid state and we were just waiting for that.

People forget that CDs and floppies were still way more common around that time than even the most popular zip disks. Even if you were big during that time, it was short lived.

I saw one of those in my high school around 2000 in abandoned computer lab.

You had me at duking

Loved my ZIP disks!

I loved any removable media drive for their mechanics - even though they tended to be rather unreliable and slow. Over the years I had a parallel port ZIP 100, internal ZIP 250 and internal Jaz drive. I was also tempted to get a SyQuest Sparq, but never did...

I still have some of my data from College on a couple of Zip disks. Haven't had a drive to look at any of it in years tho.

any restoration or obscure stuff vids ?

I loved the Zip drives. I had a 100 and later 250 and used them a TON... For about 4-5 years. lol

As much as I have been keeping up with computers and evolutions ever since I was a kid, I've never heard of the Avatar Shark. Maybe because it was meant for the US market back then, not so much for Singapore. But even Zip Disks really weren't so much of a thing because to get Data to backup from another computer would require that to have another Zip drive. So I kinda staved off backups at all until CD-RWs started to take off then stuck to them before USB drives start to get more mainstream.

Zip was so famous that I had an internal one in a drive bay at some point. They were ubiquitous until CD-R's. Not sure what Avatar, or any other company, was really thinking going up against Iomega in these days.

aww, I had one of these, it was my first non-floppy removal storage medium. I always bet on the wrong horse.

My high capacity removable storage of choice in the 90's was SCSI Magneto-Optical. I still have some drives and disks. I never got around to getting a MO drive and disks with LIMDOW. Light Intensity Modulation Direct OverWrite. Regular MO required 2 passes to over-write data. Pass 1 erased, pass 2 wrote. Only if a spot on the disk had never been written or had been erased previously could it just write. LIMDOW drives and disks could erase and write in one pass so were twice as fast at writing. LIMDOW drives could read and write regular MO disks, though had to do 2-pass writing. IIRC LIMDOW disks could be read in regular MO drives. Another storage tech I'd like to see TDNC do a video on is PD or Phase-change Dual and DVD-RAM. PD drives combined a 650 meg rewriteable disc (double that for dual sided), held in a cartridge, with a 4x CD-ROM drive. The tray was mounted on four weak springs so the PD cartridge would press it down. Eventually there would be PD/CD-R drives. I don't recall if there were ever any PD/CD-RW drives. The disc layout and writing method for PD was expanded to create DVD-RAM, which initially was available only in cartridges. DVD-RAM disks, when authored as DVD Video, could be broken out of their cartridges and played in many consumer DVD players and DVD-ROM drives. In short order, DVD-RAM cartridges were made designed to remove the disc, and eventually the cartridge was done away with. Drives that support DVD-RAM 1.0 can at least read PD discs. PD compatibility was dropped (according to the Wikipedia article) circa 1999 with DVD-RAM 2.0, which bumped per side capacity to 4.7 gig (matching single layer DVD-R) and 2x recording speed. DVD-RAM 2.0 is not to be confused with DVD-RAM2, which was mostly only used in Japan, and is not supported by many DVD players. More confusion is to be had with DVD-RAM 1.0, 2.0, 2.1, and 2.2 and *Revisions* 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, and 5.0 which are 3x, 5x, 6x, 8x, and 12x speed, respectively. Revision 6.0 at 16x speed was proposed but never made.

my dad and I had one in the late 90s or thereabouts. I don't even remember exactly when we got ours or how much we used it, but I think I used the portable adapter on my laptop In the late 90s. of course I borrowed a dauphin in the 90s from a friend's mom too though, so there's that. Her Dauphin didn't have the shark disk though.

The first time I saw a zip drive and its storage capabilities I was blown away. So awesome... until a couple of years later when rewritable cds came along and blew them away in every aspect. None of these disc systems had a chance. Even if they had a few more years to prepare for CD-R/RW, their lack of compatibility doomed them from the start.

does most laptop VGA output support TV out function?