this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2023
2579 points (98.0% liked)
Technology
59583 readers
3400 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Honestly, I think you're wrong here, they were colloquially called floppy disks because at the time the whole thing was floppy. If the first floppy disks came in hard casings, they would never have been called floppy disks
Take apart a 3.25" floppy disk, you'll find the magnetic platter (disc shaped thing) is floppy.
Take apart a hard disk drive, you'll find the magnetic platter(s) inside are metal.
If a floppy disk wasn't named after the thing inside the casing, why wasn't it called a floppy square or floppy rectangle?
It actually was originally a floppy diskette, but eventually shortened to disk because people are lazy
There's also the term Floppy Disk Drive, as opposed to Hard Disk Drive.
Diskette is a portmanteau of Disk and Cassette. The drive doesn't read the cassette, it reads the disk inside the cassette. It doesn't spin the cassette, it spins the disk inside the cassette. Hence Floppy Disk Drive. Sure calling the actual Disk+Cassette object as just "disk" is a little lazy, but calling it a floppy diskette is not lazy because the disk inside is floppy, and the the disk is the most important component of a diskette.
You're splitting hairs at this point. SSDs used to be a type of hard drive, but now people reserve the term hard drive for platter disks, even though the word came from hard vs. soft storage, which was meant to distinguish between removable and non removable storage.
Zip discs aren't called floppy despite the inside being the same as a floppy
If you search online, it's a debated topic, but if you were alive long enough ago there wasn't always this debate. They were floppy because the thing in your hand was floppy, people only debated it when those were no longer commonplace. IBM didn't even call the 3.5 one a floppy, everyone else did
Yeah I was alive long enough to have had a 5 1/4 floppy disk drive. In fact two of them, which made it more convenient to play Sid Meir's Pirates of of the Caribbean. Save on one disk drive, load game data from the other. Elite level gaming rig for the 80s.
And yeah, I also found it confusing that 3 1/2 floppies being called floppy disks. At least until I had a disk go bad and took one apart. Yup, floppy disk inside the protective case.
SSD are still a thing? They're basically standard for a PC nowadays. Are you talking about hybrid drives which were a combo of a SSD and an HDD?
Anyway, why are they called SSD instead of HDD? Solid State Drive as opposed Hard Disk Drive. No disk in the name because the device doesn't use disks. So it's neither a hard or floppy disk drive as the name indicates. I suppose you might split hairs over them being called a drive, since there's no moving parts to actually be driven, but at this point drive is just a commonly used name for storage devices. Like "footage" being used for video that's not on film.
But anyway I think you're trying to prove that the name floppy was a bad name to describe a 3 1/5" floppy disk, despite the fact that the actual disk that the data was saved on was indeed floppy, only the protective case wasn't. Maybe nowadays the protective case would be considered more relevant by a marketing department, but back in those days actual engineers named things. To an engineer, the actual disk that data was saved on is more important than the protective case the disk is contained within.
I think you misunderstood what I was saying about SSDs. SSDs are not considered "Hard Drives" any more, colloquially a hard drive now specifically means platter disks, and therefore SSDs are not hard drives. I very much disagree with it, but that's how language evolved. To me, they are hard drives, because they're still hard storage media, but the general consensus is that all hard drives have disk platters.
I'm not trying to prove that it was a bad name for 3 1/4" floppies, just that the name came from the casing, not the disk medium, and carried forward colloquially because they weren't very different from their floppy predecessors