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Writeable CDs were great when you had a lot of data to archive (digital camera photos etc) but they had drawbacks too. Burnt CDs were generally not readable on other computers until they were 'finalised' and so they were pretty useless for things like taking files to-and-from school where you need to constantly edit and delete and change.

Fortunately, Word documents were pretty small, and so I personally managed to survive with floppy disks until I finally could get a USB flash drive. For CDs I only ever really burnt fully finalised CD-Rs which I never intended to 're' write - because the rewritable aspect was too much hassle and incompatibility.

And so my feeling is very much that Zip and CD aren't technologies I would have considered equivalent.

Zip didn't catch on in the mainstream market but as basically a bigger floppy it did catch on in others and one was music production. Lots of equipment from that period had zip drives, because music files were that perfect combination of needing to edit and write and move around between different machines, while also being much bigger than text documents and too big for floppy.

If flash drives hadn't started to appear on the scene I think eventually one of the 'super floppies' (or some other equivalent rewriteable technology) would have had to emerge, because CDs really couldn't do the same job as a floppy.