There were already plenty of “successors to the floppy” in the dustbin of history (floptical, Iomega zip, LS120, …). None of them was competitive as a distribution format, or at all once CD-R became widely available.

Yeah, and the MiniDisc was the only one that could have come close. Sony already had computer MiniDisc readers/writers, mass production with pre-recorded content, (fairly) large volumes.

They just never connected these things to each other. It could have been a great standard and we would have been plagued to this day with them. :)

In some ways it's even better than USB flash. There are no read-only flash drives, for instance. It's also a problem that you mosh "data" in the same port you mosh "keyboard" or "spy device". We gained a lot with the USB paradigm but we lost some things, too.

MiniDisk! I loved that format. Great physical size. I suspect my love is all about nostalgia for the future, because when they came out they were foreign (at least in the US) and fly.

I was in college during the time, but I remember all of these digital art students had iMacs and these clear+blue FireWire zip drives they used to carry around between classes and home.

After using minidisk I was sure that LS120 would succeed. The formats of cartridged optical disks mostly removed the annoyance of scratched disks. Now the only place I see optical disks in a cartridge is at the library where they put some CDs in a cartridge to use in a special drive.

You mean like the Zip drive? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_drive

In principle, maybe, but Zip disks were errorprone, didn't store music for portable players, and were rather large and cumbersome. Minidiscs were even smaller than floppies and more robust.