Spelling of Disc | Hacker News Reader

Spelling of Disc

en.wikipedia.org

I was always mystified by the term "hard disk drive". Because when I learned about disk drives, it was in terms of floppy media, where the "disk drive" itself was a standalone device, and it "drove" the disk which you would insert into its slot. So, "disk drive" made a lot of sense for floppies.

And then the "hard disk drive" was introduced to consumers. And I suppose it made some sense, because it mechanically "drove" the rotation of a fixed disk, but it did make less sense, and really for a long time I just tried to adopt the term "hard disk" because there was no sense in tacking on "drive" when the hard disk was the item that really mattered.

Now we have "solid state disk drives" (SSD) and all perspective is lost. By definition, there is nothing to "drive" if the device is solid state. So why are vendors clinging to this "drive" terminology? It makes as much sense as "dialing" my smartphone. Oh well.

I think this is a case in which the original meaning had faded, but it's still useful to have a label for something. The use of the floppy disk as a save icon is another example; floppy disks have fallen out of use for decades, but the iconography and meaning is still the same, and unique.

> floppy disks have fallen out of use for decades

There are a lot of old devices which use floppy disks, i.e. measuring equipment.

People also used to call a 3.5" floppy a "hard disc" because it was, compared to a 5 1/4".

Also your entire computer was your "CPU" for many.

It was a frustrating time for us nerds.

We in South Africa avoided that particular problem by calling the 5.25" disk a floppy and the 3.5" disk a stiffy.

Growing up in 80s Britain I learned 3.5" were called floppy discs, and 5.25" were called floppy floppy discs.

> Early BBC technicians differentiated between disks (in-house transcription records) and discs (the colloquial term for commercial gramophone records, or what the BBC dubbed CGRs)

The reference given for this claim also states "I don't recall that anybody took any notice of this [the difference in usage of disk and disc] except in staff instructions and training manuals.", so I don't think it carries much weight.

In the U.S., and probably elsewhere, audio recordings on vinyl are referred to as "discs" overwhelmingly more often than "disks". See for example the text of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LP_record.

Also we have "discothèque" and its derivatives, not "disko...".

Just call it frisbee golf once and you’ll get the correct answer

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