Almost all digital formats die in obscurity. 3” floppies, 5v SmartMedia, Jazz disks, and DAT were good ideas in the moment that were not good ideas a moment later. The logistics of reading even popular formats like Qic 40 and ADAT today are hard.
The most ironic thing, IMO, is that at the time everyone seemed to be holding their breath for Castlewood's 'Orb drive', which promised the perfection of a fast and big storage media.
It was delayed so long that by the time it actually reached the market it didn't get noticed.
Nope, NeXT had magneto-optical 128 MB drives, somewhat related. They were 3.5" but using an entirely different media, and were absolutely incompatible with ordinary floppies.
NeXT cubes used a 256 Mb optial drive, and some slabs has. 128Mb optical, and someone said that the turbo color slab had a 230Mb optical drive. Mine did not.
NeXT boxes used magneto-optical disks, which usually meant a laser was used to heat the magnetic material during the write process, and at lower intensity to read data optically. The optics in a floptical drive are just part of the head alignment servo mechanism, so it was probably much easier to make them cheap and backwards-compatible with mainstream floppies.
