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Non-Tech : Any info about Iomega (IOM)? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jwk who wrote (50067)	3/15/1998 2:03:00 PM
From: Gmoney	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 58324

Zip Chicago Tribune article From the Motley Fool Board and Waverunner comes this article from the Chicago Tribune 03/15: NO NEED TO LUG A LAPTOP HOME WHEN A DISK WILL DO James Coates. excerpts: >>>>> Sure, a good laptop today only weighs about 8 pounds soaking wet and counting the carrying case, power brick and maybe a half dozen CD-ROMs or floppy disks. But hang 8 pounds of dead weight on your shoulder and cart it back and forth to work every day for a couple of years and that becomes 8 pounds too many. And avoirdupois poundage isn't the only thing that weighs Sisyphus 98 down while nursing a notebook through the daily grind of getting and spending. You never forget that you're carrying a couple of thousand dollars worth of equipment in that 8-pound case. It becomes a millstone that can't be left at the coat check, stuffed in the overhead compartment or tossed in the trunk. And not only are the things heavy and costly, they're fragile little devils as well. When you're not worrying about losing them you fret about breaking them. That's why Sisyphus 98 needs to pay attention to those incessant "It's Your Stuff" TV ads by Iomega Corp. touting the ZIP drive. With an estimated 12 million of these gadgets now plugged into Macs and PCs all across the globe, the age of Sisyphus 98 becomes an excellent time to examine the portability powers of a little $150 blue box called a ZIP drive. ZIP drives read and write a new breed of fat floppy disks that hold 100 megabytes of programs and data apiece instead of the 1.4 megs possible on an ordinary floppy. As Iomega executives love to point out, the great bulk of us can eliminate the laptop by simply toting a ZIP disk or two filled with our favorite programs and data back and forth from home to job site if we have a compatible drive on computers at each end. For the past couple of months I have been testing two systems that have liberated my laptop to a TV table at home and taken a real load off my tired old shoulder. I now move my stuff back and forth to the office on either a one-ounce ZIP disk or an ordinary 1.4 megabyte floppy disk that I compressed to hold 2.7 megs of stuff using the Drive Space utility built into Windows 95. Unless you are a heavy duty graphics artist with huge picture files, the compressed floppy likely is all you'll need to carry the vast bulk of all the information that you need for productivity at either end, home or office. In my case the stuff largely consists of text that I glean from the Internet or grind out personally. As I have described in past outings, I have devoted part of the past decade to creating and maintaining a huge text file called fonz.txt that contains every phone number, every PIN number, every news source, every friend and every foe that has entered my life. I just load fonz.txt into whatever word processor may be at hand and then use the software's search function to find whatever I need. This file, of course, sits at the top of both the floppy disk and the ZIP disk that I have filled with stuff to liberate me from lugging my lugubrious laptop. I also added a number of photographs, sound files and favorite documents to the ZIP disk that I carry back and forth. And even the floppy carries all the pictures I care to carry of my grandkids, Marilyn Chambers and other favorites along with all my text. This system works particularly well using a new piece of shareware software that has come my way called Jot+ Notes 2.0, an information organizer that lets you store and later search any bit of text you want to type or paste into separate windows that can be called up at will. You can find it at www.shareware.com. This random data keeper is just the ticket for saving and organizing all of the news stories, stuff said in phone calls, interview notes and other material that gets collected during a day at work. Each writing project I do now goes into a Jot file, and I keep them all on the removable disk that I tote in my coat pocket. Jot+ Notes lets me set up separate files for each of these projects as well as a major gang file for stuff I use all the time, like fonz.txt. To write this column I downloaded stuff from the Iomega Web site and a few other places and stored them in a Jot file that I consulted while working. I also have loaded my drive-by disks with a digital version of the Tribune's in-house phone directory, a guide to Chicago streets, all 37 chapters of the novel I'm writing and the complete text of the Book of Revelation. <<<<< Gary