LS-120 drives were floptical drives that were backwards-compatible with 3.5" 1.44MB disks. IIRC you needed special media to use the 120MB capacity, but the same slot could accept the common 1.44MB disks and give you much better performance than normal floppy drives. The successor LS-240 drives also had the ability to write 32MB to a standard floppy disk using shingled magnetic recording.

If Zip disks, CD-R and USB flash drives hadn't showed up, these drives would have been pretty widely recognized as the next generation of floppies.

Op meant LS120.

"Ordinary" floppies peaked in 1988 (yes, before IBM 1990 PS/2 2.88 ED) with 'Triple' or '2TD' format developed and shipped by NEC inside PC-88 VA3. 13MB unformatted, _9,120 kB_ formatted capacity. Triple because it tripled track density from 80 to 240 while reusing ED barium ferrite magnetic media and perpendicular recording head of ED drive, same ~100KB/s speed.

https://necretro.org/PC-88_VA3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_floppy_disk_formats#:~...

There was also the Sony HiFD Which was 200MB and used the same form factor disks as FDHD drives, thus maintaining compatibility.

It had a 'click of death'-like failure like Zip did though, and lost the battle during its recall and redesign. (IOMEGA were lucky in that the click of death didn't really kill Zip's market until about the time that CDR/CDRW was beating them anyway)