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Comment by smitty1e | Hacker News Reader

How about the 3.5" floppy icon meaning "save" in so many applications?

The meaning of the symbol outlives the technology that begat the symbol.

Favorite obsolete tech story: a coworker's kid saw a 3.5" floppy on their desk and said "Cool, you 3d printed the save icon?"

Better than that was a client's son at a flea market called over "Dad, come look... black CDs!"

They were 45's.

Its a meme to young people. They know what floppies are.

Given that that story, with that specific wording, has been a running joke circulating around the Internet for years, I suspect your co-worker's kid has never said any such thing.

The name “floppy” is itself a fossil as the entire device is rigid; in the 5.25” version the disk itself is still flexible but the envelope is inherently rigid due to geometry; only in the original 8” version was not only the disk flexible but the envelope, while stiffer, was trivially deformable by accident.

The disk is still soft in a 3.5" floppy. It's just in a hard case.

5.25" floppies had a much softer case. They would, for example, sag and bend under their own weight if you held one end, or bend due to air resistance if you waved them around. They didn't have rigid envelopes.

I have no experience with 8" disks.

8" disks were like 5.25" - a plastic disk inside a plastic envelope.

I did work experience at a printer in the mid 80s, and their photosetting machine used 8" floppies.

Eight inch disks aren't any more floppy than 5¼" disks.

Source: The three eight inch disks on my desk right now.

They were called floppy disks as compared to hard disk packs. The hard disk packs had their platters made of glass or something rigid.

Floppy disks had platters/recording surfaces that were plastic, thus "floppy". Had nothing to do with the envelopes as such.

The device is rigid but the disk inside (note the device is a square, not a disk) is very much deformable. This can be verified by sliding the metal springdoor to the side and handling the floppy disk revealedd underneath

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