WhereIsAtlas · Iomega
What Happened to Iomega?
The company behind the Zip disk, once the essential way to back up a PC — now gone.
Iomega made the Zip drive and Zip disk, the iconic removable storage of the 1990s. EMC bought the company in 2008, the business became LenovoEMC, and the brand was eventually retired as flash storage took over.
A storage company finds its hit
Iomega was founded in Utah in 1980, but for its first decade it was a relatively modest data-storage maker. Everything changed in 1994 when it introduced the Zip drive. The disks were small, hardy and held many times more data than a floppy, making them an instant hit at a time when personal computing was still dominated by 3.5-inch floppies.
The Zip disk era
The Zip drive quickly became a standard feature of home and office computing. People used it for backups, for carrying big files between machines and for swapping data. The disks' distinctive look — and the "click" of inserting one — became a small part of 1990s computing culture. Iomega also launched the larger Jaz drive and later the Clik! disk.
The long decline and the EMC deal
The Zip's reign was short-lived in the grand scheme of things. Rewritable CD and DVD drives, and then USB flash drives, made removable disks seem bulky and slow. Iomega's fortunes fell with the format. In 2008 EMC bought Iomega, and the business eventually became LenovoEMC. The once-ubiquitous brand was quietly retired.
Where Iomega is now
Iomega no longer exists as a company. Its Zip drives are a nostalgia item, remembered by anyone who backed up a computer in the 1990s. The technology it championed — portable, removable storage — lives on in the USB sticks and memory cards everyone carries today, but the Iomega name itself is history.
Entries in this story
Sources
- Iomega - Wikipedia — Wikipedia (2026-09-05)
- EMC buys Iomega — ZDNET (2026-09-05)