First post, by snorg
It always bugged me to no end that back in the day the only option was floppies or CDs. CDs could store a lot of data and eventually became dirt cheap due to economies of scale, but the damn jewel cases were fidgety and fragile as hell, not to mention problems with the disks themselves getting scratched or burning useless coasters on early drives. I would have liked to have seen something that was about the size of a 3.5" floppy but much higher capacity, around 100-250mb (like the Zip, only maybe floptical/magneto optical). The Zip had its own problems and was too little, too late.
3.5" floppies were the perfect size. You could fit them into a smaller system, they could take a bit more abuse than a CD, and they were cheap. In the early days of CDs, you couldn't always count on someone having an optical drive but everyone had a 3.5" floppy.
Now with wireless internet everywhere (or nearly) and optical media on the way out, I'm not sure what the equivalent really is. SD cards? Flash drives? Are we beyond physical media now?