Access a Zip 250 Disk with an Apple Watch

If you were around and using computers in the 1990s, you may remember the Zip drive with a then massive capacity of 100MB, and later versions that packed in 250 and 750MB. This might not seem amazing today, but when you consider that the normal floppy disks of the day held less than 2MB when formatted, this was an amazing amount of space. While they enjoyed some limited success, they never really reached a “critical mass” and are now more or less relics of a “more civilized age.”

The question then becomes will it work with modern tech, so YouTuber napabar has decided to find out if he can connect one to an Apple watch. As seen in the video below, this can indeed be done, but involves a few tricks to get this information to your wrist. First, he’s sharing the disk’s contents vi an iOS FTP/WebDAV server called Rumpus, which is accessible via a website. After texting the disk’s location to his watch, it’s just a matter of clicking the appropriate links to access files. He’s able to view pictures and GIFs, and even do some simple file management like renaming and deleting files, and can even create new folders.

Upload functionality is not available, but he is able to eject the disk via a Rumpus script, though the watch then displays an error as the root of the drive is no longer accessible. Sure, it’s not practical, but it’s pretty neat to see that this old tech will still work with a few tricks!

[h/t: Gizmodo]