Enter the Iomega Zip drive. Introduced in 1994, the Zip disk held (later 250MB, then 750MB), roughly 70 times the capacity of a floppy, with faster seek times. For a producer like RZA, who worked out of his basement studio (the “36 Chambers” in Staten Island), the Zip disk became the song file . It allowed him to save an entire, fully-mixed sampler sequence as a single project.
– "From Staten Island to the Main Stage: Ghostface Killah’s Ironman and the Art of the Street Epic" (in The Rise of the Southern and Midwest Hip Hop , 2015) ghostface killah ironman zip work
Someone behind them laughed — short, hard. A man in a suit stepped out of the shadows, the kind of man whose teeth are filed to handle the taste of other people’s money. "You want answers, Ghost?" he asked. The city gave him a name and it stuck like gum. Enter the Iomega Zip drive