How else you going to load CD-ROM drivers if you lose them? If not on a floppy?
I’ve never even had to load cd-rom drivers. Most modern os’s (98 or better) just install automatically.
A bit more history –
As people have noted, the 100 MB+ superdrive and the Zip drive have been out for quite a while. Before they came out, there were any number of formats of magneto-optical drives (hybrid drives that used optical means to improve the writing density on the disk). These were expensive and cumbersome, but they could hold hundreds of megabytes at a time when that was the standard size of a hard drive.
When the Zip drive first came out around 95(?), it was revolutionary because it was small, relatively inexpensive and it was of a comparable magnitude with hard drives, so you could back up you 600 MB hard drive on a few Zip disks for around $100.00. For a short period of time, you could have become very wealthy investing in Iomega because it looked like they had a lock on the new drive format. They even were developing/produced a 1 Gig version (the Jazz, I think).
Then a funny thing happened… Hard drives got really big and really cheap. If you have a two gigabyte + hard drive, you now need a whole bunch of Zip disks (or really expensive, flaky Jazz disks) to backup your drive. We won’t even talk about floppy disks. For the price of the Zip disks, you could actually buy a second hard drive and backup onto that.
Now Zip disks were still useful for transporting large graphics files and applications, but no longer so useful for backups. Instead, people started using CD ROMs. (Still expensive at that time, but the disks were almost archival and you could hold 600 MB). The increasing popularity of CD ROMs drove the price of the media down to less than a dollar each. At that price, you could use the media once even for temporary data files and then just toss it. This, combined with some world-class fumbling of the ball on Iomega’s part pretty much ended the chance of the Zip drive becoming a standard.
As other people have noted, increased connectivity made sneaker-net deliveries using floppies/Zip disks unnecessary. In 1997 or so, 56K modems ruled the networking cosmos. A year later, DSL and cable made 56K a bad joke.
Actually the SmartMedia cards and similar media were first developed as a replacement for the 3.5" floppies. While they never achieve that, they did become very common with digital cameras, etc.
Even though I have a floppy drive I think I am going to get a Smartmedia reader for my computer and this for the following reason: On the hard disks of both computers (tower and laptop) I have all my vital information duly encrypted but the PGP keys are on the same disk so if the computer is stolen or compromised, the information can be compromised.
Now, if I have a smartmedia reader, I can just have the keys and other important files on a Smartmedia card and plug it when I use the computer and unplug it when I leave. That way the information is always with me and always secure. Smart media cards are tiny and can hold up to 128 MB which is way more than I need to keep all my vital files. Not to mention my digital camera also uses them so I already have a few. I only need the reader as I cannot use the camera to write to them.