What we have here is one of the earliest examples of PC based removable mass storage – a Bernoulli Box made by IoMega. The Bernoulli bit refers to the effect of a thin air cushion generated by the spinning disk which served to keep the read write head from touching the disk causing damage and wear. Bernoulli was the physicist who discovered  it.

We bought this one in the late eighties as a way of shifting large volumes of data between Unix systems. As you can see if you study the ports on the back it used a full SCSI interface which meant it had a high data transfer rate for the time. To attach it to a PC you needed a special parallel printer to SCSI interface cable that avoided you having to put a SCSI interface card in your PC.

So you could use this as an easy way to move data between PC’s and Unix computers – right. Aha – no such luck. The Unix drives formatted the disk & data one way and the PC drivers did it a totally different (and non-compatible) way. Never the twain met. Which was a shame.

The Shopper cover CD is in the pictures just to give you an idea of the scale & size of the thing. It has a strong & robust carrying handle. Many reader will probably be familiar with the successor to this device – the IoMega ZIP drive that was an eighth of the size (by volume) and a fraction of the cost, but essentially, from a functionality point of view, pretty much the same thing but smaller. And it had a USB interface that meant ZIP drives were much easier to install.

But, such is the relentless progress of computer technology, that even the mega-useful ZIP drive is now just a relic, beaten into obscurity by pen drives a fraction of the size with 100 times the capacity. However, always ready to innovate IoMega now have the REV drives with removable media up to 70Gb click here for details.