They were a nice alternative to the Syquest and Bernoulli disks we were using at the time–inasmuch as they were cheaper and I didn’t need to worry if the person I was going to send a file to had a 44, 88, 135 or 270 MB SyQuest: almost everyone had a Zip drive.

…but the click-of-death hurt them, and the ubiquity of CDRs and USB thumb drives was the real end.