Why Zip drives dominated the 90s, then vanished almost overnight

I don't know what most people did. I know that the business I worked for then needed to transfer relatively large sets of files on a regular basis. We owned hundreds of zip disks.

This was after Syquest disks and before CDs. At the time we used zip disks, CD burners were still very expensive. Later, when CD burner prices came down, we switched to those. Still later, mostly FTP.

they were pretty dominant in a lot of sectors. AutoDesk products pre-cloud produced large files (well, they still do, but transport is no longer an issue.) -- so zip drives were pretty ubiquitous in design until CD-R.