Your making a leap between “the time when everything was only on floppies” to “the time when everyone was doing multimedia online”, which ignores at least a dec

Your making a leap between “the time when everything was only on floppies” to “the time when everyone was doing multimedia online”, which ignores at least a decade of time starting in the mid 90s, and there absolutely was a huge need for it. During that time, the main storage media was CDs, often used for software or mp3s. Games and other materials (like Encarta) were shipped on CDs because there was no Internet with lots of media, and anyone who did have it was on dialup. Shipping large data on CDs was the way it was done. However CDs have the very obvious problem that they are not writable (CD writers were rare and very expensive for many years in the beginning), and once the writable ones came out they were still not suitable for things like random access read/write for typical documents, only really used more for archiving. That’s why Zip drives were such a game changer (and the various other, now forgotten, attempts at solving this problem). Magneto-optical fall into this same time period.