I had a zip disk for all my work in college. It's completely impractical for anything these days, but it was so much fun. Having 100mb in your bag in the era of floppies made you feel like a king.
There two dead end technologies of the 1990s that combined magnetism and lasers in different ways.
That ZIP disc was a "floptical" disk that worked basically like a floppy but used a laser to read grooves on the disc that improved alignment and let them pack tracks in denser.
There also were "magneto-optical" discs that would use a laser to heat a spot on a disc and allow recording spots much smaller than the magnetic head. It could read out finer too because the laser could read the magnetic fields with
Some examples of those were the MO drive on the NEXT cube and Sony's mini-discs for music which I think are fun to collect but I had the laser burn out on my portable which can write tracks with metadata out of my PC and gotta either find another one with a working laser or settle for recording on my big decks without metadata.
