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In March 1995 Iomega put a cobalt blue plastic square on sale for about twenty dollars. It held 100 megabytes when the floppy disk on your desk held 1.44. Fourteen months later the Zip drive company from Roy, Utah was worth 6.4 billion dollars on the Nasdaq and climbing toward seven — the hottest stock in America, pushed there by ordinary people arguing on an America Online message board.
Thirteen years later, EMC bought what was left of Iomega for 213 million dollars. Three cents on the dollar.

This is the full story of how Iomega erased itself: the Bernoulli Box that could not crash, the 1983 IPO, Kim Edwards arriving from General Electric with no engineering background and the best marketing instincts the storage industry ever saw, and the Gillette model that made the company rich — ten dollars of profit on a 200 dollar drive, and nine high-margin disks sold for every drive. Then the decision to defend that disk margin with lawyers: 14.99 dollars charged per support phone call, lawsuits in France, Germany and the United States against Nomai, the French rival that dared to make a cheaper compatible disk, and a 21 million dollar buyout that ended with the Avranches factory closed.

We also settle the myth. The "click of death" is not what killed Iomega — Zip drives kept selling for five more years and the 50 millionth shipped in June 2003. What killed Iomega was a blank CD-R that cost 50 cents and held 650 megabytes, and then the USB flash drive that needed no cartridge, no cable and no proprietary anything. The class action over the click of death was settled with rebates worth up to 40 dollars, redeemable against the purchase of another Iomega product.
And the strangest part of the legacy has nothing to do with storage. The Iomega folder on AOL — 40 messages a day in 1995, thousands within a year, investors driving past the Roy plant on Sundays to count cars in the parking lot — was the first meme stock, decades before anyone used the phrase.

If you owned a Zip drive, mailed a disk to somebody, or sold them behind a counter, tell us in the comments: the model, the year, and whether it still works.

SOURCES
Linked sources
Hackaday — "From Zip To Nought: The Rise And Fall Of Iomega": https://hackaday.com/2026/03/24/from-...
Tedium — "An Annoying Clicking Sound: Iomega's Zip Disk and the Click of Death": https://tedium.co/2016/12/06/iomega-z...
The Motley Fool — "The Rule Breaker Portfolio, Buying IOM, 05/16/95" (drive and disk economics, 1995): https://www.fool.com/archive/portfoli...
Deseret News — "Fools' rush in, send Iomega stock soaring" (May 1996, 6.4 billion dollar market value): https://www.deseret.com/1996/5/23/192...
The New York Times — "Iomega Accepts Takeover Offer" (EMC, 213 million dollars, April 2008): https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/09/te...
Additional sources (unlinked)
Deseret News — "Resignation of Iomega CEO stuns industry" (March 1998)
Businessweek — Peter Burrows, "How Iomega Lost Its Zip" and "Kim Edwards: End Of A Reign At Iomega" (April 1998)
Deseret News — "Iomega proposes settlement to end suit" (April 2001)
StorageNewsletter — "History (1994): Kim Edwards President and CEO, Iomega"
Gibson Research Corporation — "Zip & Jaz Drive Click Death" and the Trouble in Paradise utility
Wikipedia — Iomega, Zip drive, Click of death, Nomaï
The New York Times — "Shares off sharply at Iomega, storage disk maker" (July 2001)
Computerworld — "The Iomega brand is now LenovoEMC" (June 2013)
Computer History Museum — collections catalog, Iomega hardware
US Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI data via in2013dollars — 1995 to 2026 conversion

This channel is made by an enthusiast who loves business and technology history — nothing more. All videos are for educational and entertainment purposes only and reflect my personal views and interpretations. I research each story carefully using publicly available sources, but errors or omissions can happen. Nothing here is professional, financial, or legal advice, and this channel is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any company mentioned.