So the word "floppy" was itself vestigial.
[Edit] there used to be a website, similar to bash.org, that people would submit stories like this all the time of stupid shit they were running into as a tech. Dont recall what it was. There was also and admin site, they may have been the same.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxt5A0KJ9nw [Early CD-ROM Drives: Why Did They Require a Caddy?]
And don't forget you can notch each side for double the storage!
```just a word of warning, copy everything off them [commercially-available flippable 5.25" BBC Micro disks] quick, as the 'side2' goes backwards to the cotton cloth cleaner inside the 5 1/4" case, so basically all the crap caught in it then end up coming out when playing other flip side :('''
(No idea how common this phenomenon might have been! - I've always had double-sided drives, so I've always used the other side of the disk in the normal fashion.)
I have taken the floppy out of the sleeves to dry them out as the entirety of my collection fell in the aquarium.
Writable == tape
Find me someone who used 5.25 who didn’t do this and I’ll fight you.
Then there were things like fdformat ... because software had a very close relationship with the hardware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2M_(DOS)
These machines ran off a program that was stored on 8" floppies. All the workers had been told to NEVER EVER touch the floppies. Well one night, a disk went bad and had to be replaced. To the horror of the operator, my boss ripped the magnetic media out through the spindle hole, looked at it closely, and proclaimed "Yep. It's bad"
Maybe the thing I thought of as a "sleeve" (analogous to a album "sleeve") is actually called something else (maybe an "envelope"?) - I never really gave it thought until now, honestly.
It had The Black Cauldron, PC Jr bootable version on it.
It snowed. It was the winter break, so there was no going back to school to see the other kid who had made the copy for me, not for 2 weeks. This was supposed to be my fun game for the break....
So, I carefully opened the disk, set it to dry over the heating vent, put it back together, and with the help of Norton Utilities 5.0's Disk Doctor, I got a mostly playable copy out of it. Absolutely amazing.
At the time, "hard disk" referred to the spinning disk inside the computer & so though "floppy" wasn't technically accurate when referring to the 3.5 inch floppy, it was a nomenclature referring its utility or type rather than a physical description actual object itself.
"Floppies" were the things that you stuck in and removed... didn't matter their covering material, nor what size they were.
It's interesting to think about how many of our words have the same kind of history; once having a widespread descriptive meaning associated with physical traits of the object itself which ultimately were divorced from the original meaning over time...
I'm going to hazard a guess that most of our nouns have that kind of history... but the interesting thing here is that this morphing happened so quickly and it's because the object itself changed, not some generational loss of original meaning...
Another example is when someone refers to recording something as "taping" it, even though tape as a recording medium is mostly long gone. In their conversations, the term "taping" made the leap from "recording on tape" to simply "recording", and lost its original meaning.
Low-level LSI-11 processor variant, 128k RAM, (2) 8" floppy drives. The case was 75% floppy drive, 25 % processor boards on top.
Came with RT-11 build floppies, I had to run the OS build in order to generate a boot disk and three language/utility disks. Took about 8 hours to do the full optioning and build from the 13 source floppies.
Ahh, the old days. Wrote my first D&D game, ballistic path analysis, mandelbrot drawn to 80x24 greenscreen VT01...
8-inch: 1972
5.25-inch: 1976
3.5-inch: 1982