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Comment by berkut | Hacker News Reader

Slightly off-topic, but since when were floppies referred to as "disc", as opposed to "disk"? I thought it was from Diskette?

Is it a language / region thing?

Optical discs were "disc", but at least growing up in the UK in the 80s/90s with DOS/Windows, I'm pretty certain I remember them always being "disk" for floppies?

Am I misremembering?

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It is/was the usual British usage. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelling_of_disc

The OED includes these references:

1947 Math. Tables & Other Aids Computation 2 229 The program of the Symposium was as follows:..4. ‘Magnetic and phosphor coated disks’ by Dr. B. L. Moore.

1952 Electr. Engin. (U.S.) Aug. 745/2 When the heads are in position, the disk is rotated past them while information, in the form of coded magnetic pulses, is recorded or read out.

1964 T. W. McRae Impact Computers on Accounting i. 8 48 disks were stored one above the other.

1972 Computer Jrnl. 15 290/1 Engineering information files set up on disc by Hawker Siddeley Aviation Ltd..form the data base for a fully integrated production control system.

1982 What's New in Computing Nov. 12/4 Back up for the discs is provided on a tape streamer, tape cartridge or floppy.

1990 G. Gilder Life after Television (1992) iii. 63 A computer with a hard-disk memory, together with a compact disc read-only memory.

The last one has K for magnetic disks and C for optical discs.

See https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/53642

> The last one has K for magnetic disks and C for optical discs.

The Wikipedia article affirms this convention as well, which begs the question: solid state disk drive? solid state disc drive? solid state brick drive?

Solid State Drive, SSD. No disc or disk involved.

I would go with disk, if I were going to refer to it that way, due to the relation to hard disk drives.

The 'k' spelling is American. Look at the ports on the BBC and you'll find British spellings of 'analogue', 'disc'.

https://oldcomputers.net/bbc-micro.html

The User manual contains more language. For example, 'program' for computer program (vs 'programme' which would be used for TV)

http://bbc.nvg.org/doc/BBCUserGuide-1.00.pdf

The Amstrad CPC was "disc" too, reputedly because the first mouldings used it by mistake and Amstrad was too cheap to ever correct their error.

I read somewhere a long time ago (I forget where) that it was (or tended to be) "disc" where the format came from the audio world, and "disk" otherwise. So, "Compact Disc", but "hard disk". No idea if this is rubbish or not but maybe it jogs someone's memory.

The way I was taught was that "disk" is when you don't touch it directly (disk drive, floppy disk) and "disc" is when you can (compact disc, frisbee disc).

I remember it the same way. But then if floppies are diskettes, what's the non-'ette' disk referring to?

DASD Direct-access storage device[0]

Disk Pack[1] perhaps?

Answer seems to be the 8" floppy disk[2] which only IBM called "Diskette-1" and 5-1/4" ones called mini-diskettes, floppy diskettes, etc.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct-access_storage_device

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_pack

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk#8-inch_floppy_disk

> But then if floppies are diskettes, what's the non-'ette' disk referring to

Fixed disks (which were also quite large at the time.) Floppies were removable disks, like cassettes; disk + cassette = diskettes, also disk + dimunitive -ette = diskette.

Note that removable hard disks and hard disk cartridges were also a thing.

So you think diskette was derived from disk, where disk refers to “8-inch floppy disk introduced by IBM under the name of diskette”?

https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/vintage/vintage_450...

I’d say IBM called floppy disks diskettes by opposition to hard disks, which were huge at that time:

https://www.computerhistory.org/storageengine/winchester-pio...

No IBM person would say hard disk, it was always DASD. I suspect that the 'hard' prefix gained usage after the introduction of floppies.

I don't say they were called hard disks. They were called disks (DASD is the whole device, not just the storage disk). And of course they were hard!

And then they introduced little disks (a 8-inch floppy was small and light compared to existing disks) and called them diskettes.

Yeah, it's probably relative, I've rarely used disks larger than the 8" floppies so would never call them diskettes, the 5 1/4" were commonly called that in my circles. In IBM circles of the time they'd have a different default scale.

Like I remember being surprised the first time I heard someone refer to AA batteries as the big kind.

But you didn't come up with the name Diskette, IBM did when they created the floppy disk :-)

That's highly relevant if the question is "what's the non-'ette' disk referring to".

No idea, but someone uses disc here: https://jdebp.eu/FGA/floppy-discs-are-90mm-not-3-and-a-half-...

(btw, diskette comes from disk)

I've kinda wondered if the "c" spelling comes from "discus", i.e. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discus_throw

I have absolutely no evidence for or against this though.

Spanish uses "disco", maybe French is simillar.

From the US 80-90's (c64/Amiga/DOS), I remember it as "disk". I always thought "disc" was European in origin.

We also used hard disk/floppy disk here in Europe (NL). My recollection is as the GP says, "disc" was only consistently used for optical discs (CD, DVD, BR).

It may still be that "disc" is European in origin -- the original CD came from Philips (NL) and Sony (JP) -- but for computer components, I've never seen it spelled "disc".

Weirdly BR is BD.

Isn't this simply because disk is short for diskette? Which is the word for a floppy often used in the 80's and 90's.

This is so off topic and/but (currently) still the top comment.

Since when would anyone remember how to properly write something, when the representation he has is the phonetics in his head?

Nobody thinks "It's disk, because it comes from diskette."

Why do people argue as if anyone would think like that? - Though I don't doubt that it's the origin. Are we supposed to know the origin of (every)thing(s)? - We mostly don't.

To then write it "disc" makes sense, except you are from Germany.

To then pseudo-intellectually pretend that people know whatever and what not and don't rather go by guts feel (what it sounds like) is blatantly dishonest.

20 posts in two years and you use 21 to complain this is still off topic post is still #1. Drop a parent level post if you have something better to discuss, don't reply on this post saying this doesn't meet your standards

> Nobody thinks "It's disk, because it comes from diskette."

uh ? that's pretty much how I think all the time when writing words for which I'm not sure of the spelling

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