Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park said, “…your scientists were so busy wondering if they could or couldn’t, that they stopped to think about whether they should.” YouTuber Napabar tried to connect an Apple Watch to an old Iomega Zip Drive, and perhaps he should have taken that advice into consideration before attempting it. Of course, he did.
Iomega is known for its high-capacity disk drives from the mid-to-late 90s (100MB was monstrous for the time), which suddenly stopped working and destroyed data in the process. This was because the company ignored important issues and also retired some hardware that wasn't durable. The fact that a Zip drive still exists is perhaps the most impressive part. Of course, seeing the Apple Watch access files on a Zip disk is certainly a fun collaboration between two different generations of technology.
The original Iomega drives connected to computers via a parallel port cable, while later versions, including the 250GB model, were easily ported to USB. The truth is that an Apple Watch doesn't have a cable or USB. So to make this strange connection between the two, a piece of software called Rumpus, which serves files over the Internetvia FTP. A link was sent to the Apple Watch, which opened the basic browser and seemed capable enough to open and manage files stored on a Zip drive connected to an iMac.
Unfortunately, there's no practical use for this hack. Even with the USB connection to the iMac, pulling files from a floppy disk is painfully slow. Even cheaper USB flash drives will be faster, and there's much less risk of the drive failing in the process and getting all the data.
