[PaulHoule]

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerr_effect

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.