Iomega
company previously known as Iomega
Iomega Corporation (later LenovoEMC) was a company that produced external, portable, and networked data storage products. Established in the 1980s in Roy, Utah, United States, Iomega sold more than 410 million digital storage drives and disks, including the Zip drive floppy disk system. Formerly a public company, it was acquired by EMC Corporation in 2008, and then by Lenovo, which rebranded the product line as LenovoEMC, until discontinuation in 2018.
History
Iomega started in Roy, Utah, U.S. in 1980, with the original founders Jerome Paul Johnson, David Bailey, and David Norton. Its headquarters were moved to San Diego, California in 2001. For many years, it was a significant name in the data storage industry. Iomega's most famous product, the Zip drive, offered relatively large amounts of storage on portable, high-capacity floppy disks. The original Zip disk's 100 MB capacity was a huge improvement over the decades-long standard of 1.44 MB standard floppy disks. The Zip drive became a common internal and external peripheral for IBM-compatible and Macintosh personal computers. However, Zip drives sometimes failed after a short period, which failure was commonly referred to as the "click of death." This problem, combined with competition from CD-RW drives, caused Zip drive sales to decline dramatically, even after introducing larger 250 MB and 750 MB versions.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Iomega” as company previously known as Iomega. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as company previously known as Iomega. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1327887. 2 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 3 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2008, 2018, 1980 and 2001.
Later summaries often reconcile disputed chronology or motive more neatly than the contemporary record permits. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
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Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Iomega”, its source revision and the description used here.
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- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Iomega” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.