As an ancient person who grew up during the transition from actually floppy 5.25 inch disks to rigid 3.5 disks, it really bothers me that the hard ones are called “floppy.”
I know it’s about the innards still being flexible inside the plastic shell, but I grew up calling those (save icon ones) hard disks to distinguish them from the floppy ones.
Even more bonus points for including an IZOT Bulgarian 8" disk, just the same as I’ve seen at my dad’s workplace as a kid 😄 They kept them on the shelves for historical reasons at this point I guess, because most PCs there had the 3.25" ones.
Damn, this took me down memory lane… now I need some Fortran punchcards to wipe my tears with.
Was this before actual hard disk drives became popular?
I remember as a child one of my friends has a very old computer, even for the nineties. All of the programs had to be loaded on with 3.5" floppy disks each time we wanted to run them. There was a cargo ship management game that we messed with that I was too young to understand. I was really interested in “ballast” as cargo because it was zero cost; no wonder I didn’t make any money.
Was this before actual hard disk drives became popular?
Real answer: yes, but also no. Depends on context.
Professionally, proper hard-disks go back before 8" floppies, let alone the 5.25" and their stiffer 3.5" counterparts. But those drives were comically oversized appliances (like rack-mount and even mini-fridge sized) compared to the stuff we have now.
For home-gamers, PCS have shipped with all three floppy formats shown above, at different times. Hard Drives start showing up for IBM PCs after they miniaturize to fit in the 5.25" drive bay form-factor. But all that’s just before the invention of the 3.5" floppy, and well ahead of it’s popularity as something that comes standard.
Thanks for the nostalgia hit, I never used the 8” ones, but 5.25” was my childhood using the C64. I used to pirate so much using those bad boys :)
Sadly, my best friend at the time only had a cassette drive and loading stuff would take ages so we mostly played at my place.
This is how it would sound :) almost as iconic as the dial-up sound for me.
I grew up calling those (save icon ones) hard disks to distinguish them from the floppy ones
This was just you. I’m also from the before-times, and was using cassettes as a storage medium before even seeing my first floppy drive. But, nobody called the ones with a sliding window “hard drives”. Diskettes, maybe, but more frequently just floppies, or 3.5 inch floppies to distinguish them from the bigger ones.
IBM PCs introduced computers with hard drives before they even switched to the 3.5 inch format. The earliest IBM PCs only had 5.25 inch floppies, often 2 drives. But the XT from 1983 came with a 10 MB drive by default, but still used 5.25 inch floppies. By the time IBM switched to 3.5 inch floppies, the hard drive was well established. That was in about 1987 with the PS/2 models.
The earliest Mac computers took a surprisingly long time to come with a hard drive. The earliest model Macs starting in 1984 came with 3.5 inch drives and no hard drive. It wasn’t until 1987 that Macs started coming with hard drives. So, I could maybe imagine someone who used macs not knowing what a hard drive was during that 3-year window. OTOH, someone who only used Macs wouldn’t have known about 5.25 inch drives because Macs never used those, so there wouldn’t have been a need to distinguish between 5.25 inch drives and 3.5 inch ones.
The big ones are not rigid, they flop around. The smaller ones (the save icon ones) have a rigid plastic case that does not flop. Inside both kinds is a floppy disk though, hence them both having that name. “Hard disks” have metal platters that decidedly do not flop, in or out of their case.
The black and orange are 8" and 5.25" floppy disks. The blue one is a 3.5" diskette. There was also a 3" diskette that was widely used for instance by Amstrad. It was very similar to 3.5" with the built in shutter for protection of the disk.
But the official name for 3½ inch was “Micro diskette” ergo **diskette" was a short form adopted, and calling it floppy is IMO technically wrong.
There were several differences between a floppy and a diskette, that made the diskette superior in practical use, as mentioned the shutter made the diskette easier to handle, as it didn’t need to be taken in and out of sleeves when used, it was easier to transport in for instance a school bag, because of the more sturdy harder plastic, and the metal shutter is way more solit than the paper sleeve used for floppies. 3 and 3½" also had a tab for enabling write protection and removing it again indefinitely, unlike the clumsy taping over the notch on a 5.25" floppy.
There is no way 3" and 3.5" are called floppy, their correct name is diskette.
Obviously they are not hard disks, that’s even worse than calling them floppies.
But many people already back when they were at their height, misnamed diskettes as floppies, so the more accurate naming scheme never really stuck, and today diskette is called a floppy even on Wikipedia. 🤡
Similarly a drive for 3" and 3,5 inch diskettes is called a diskette drive not a floppy drive, which obviously is for floppies.
Not originally no, at least not here in Denmark in the mid 80’s. Nobody called them floppy among the people and dealers I knew, and I knew a lot of people who were computer enthusiasts. I also knew several dealers, since we used more than a thousand diskettes per month, to distribute software. I think the bad habit of using wrong terms didn’t really happen until the computer illiterate began to use computers too, either for work or for early internet.
People who called them floppy came later, and were mostly people that might as well have called them thingies.
As an ancient person who grew up during the transition from actually floppy 5.25 inch disks to rigid 3.5 disks, it really bothers me that the hard ones are called “floppy.”
I know it’s about the innards still being flexible inside the plastic shell, but I grew up calling those (save icon ones) hard disks to distinguish them from the floppy ones.
For the confused:
Bonus points for including an 8" disk as well, which even most computer nerds have never seen one of in real life.
Even more bonus points for including an IZOT Bulgarian 8" disk, just the same as I’ve seen at my dad’s workplace as a kid 😄 They kept them on the shelves for historical reasons at this point I guess, because most PCs there had the 3.25" ones.
Damn, this took me down memory lane… now I need some Fortran punchcards to wipe my tears with.
Was this before actual hard disk drives became popular?
I remember as a child one of my friends has a very old computer, even for the nineties. All of the programs had to be loaded on with 3.5" floppy disks each time we wanted to run them. There was a cargo ship management game that we messed with that I was too young to understand. I was really interested in “ballast” as cargo because it was zero cost; no wonder I didn’t make any money.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ports_of_Call_(video_game) I think I found the game
Amazing! That’s exactly it!
I would be confident just based on the summary, but I remember that minigame where you pilot the boat in the harbor.
They were popular, just prohibitively expensive for very little storage.
I mean, at home we had HDDs long before 3.5" drives. And although paltry today, having 10, 20, and 40mb fses were really nice at the time
The first computers had one, sometimes two floppy drives, and zero hdds.
The first computers had neither
Real answer: yes, but also no. Depends on context.
Professionally, proper hard-disks go back before 8" floppies, let alone the 5.25" and their stiffer 3.5" counterparts. But those drives were comically oversized appliances (like rack-mount and even mini-fridge sized) compared to the stuff we have now.
For home-gamers, PCS have shipped with all three floppy formats shown above, at different times. Hard Drives start showing up for IBM PCs after they miniaturize to fit in the 5.25" drive bay form-factor. But all that’s just before the invention of the 3.5" floppy, and well ahead of it’s popularity as something that comes standard.
Thanks for the nostalgia hit, I never used the 8” ones, but 5.25” was my childhood using the C64. I used to pirate so much using those bad boys :) Sadly, my best friend at the time only had a cassette drive and loading stuff would take ages so we mostly played at my place.
This is how it would sound :) almost as iconic as the dial-up sound for me.
Similar to the sound of the dot matrix printer, 😂
This was just you. I’m also from the before-times, and was using cassettes as a storage medium before even seeing my first floppy drive. But, nobody called the ones with a sliding window “hard drives”. Diskettes, maybe, but more frequently just floppies, or 3.5 inch floppies to distinguish them from the bigger ones.
IBM PCs introduced computers with hard drives before they even switched to the 3.5 inch format. The earliest IBM PCs only had 5.25 inch floppies, often 2 drives. But the XT from 1983 came with a 10 MB drive by default, but still used 5.25 inch floppies. By the time IBM switched to 3.5 inch floppies, the hard drive was well established. That was in about 1987 with the PS/2 models.
The earliest Mac computers took a surprisingly long time to come with a hard drive. The earliest model Macs starting in 1984 came with 3.5 inch drives and no hard drive. It wasn’t until 1987 that Macs started coming with hard drives. So, I could maybe imagine someone who used macs not knowing what a hard drive was during that 3-year window. OTOH, someone who only used Macs wouldn’t have known about 5.25 inch drives because Macs never used those, so there wouldn’t have been a need to distinguish between 5.25 inch drives and 3.5 inch ones.
The disks (circles) inside are all floppy. Just the exterior got more rigid.
“Is your disk hard or floppy?”
Depends. The classic dilemma of big, thin, and floppy or short, thick, and stiff.
I’m confused. Those all look equally hard to me
(Also, I was born in 2009)
The big ones are not rigid, they flop around. The smaller ones (the save icon ones) have a rigid plastic case that does not flop. Inside both kinds is a floppy disk though, hence them both having that name. “Hard disks” have metal platters that decidedly do not flop, in or out of their case.
The left two are bendable like a fedex envelope, the one on the right is hard plastic
It might help to take a closer look at the height of each disk casing to guess why two are called floppy and one hard.
The black and orange are 8" and 5.25" floppy disks. The blue one is a 3.5" diskette. There was also a 3" diskette that was widely used for instance by Amstrad. It was very similar to 3.5" with the built in shutter for protection of the disk.
But the official name for 3½ inch was “Micro diskette” ergo **diskette" was a short form adopted, and calling it floppy is IMO technically wrong.
There were several differences between a floppy and a diskette, that made the diskette superior in practical use, as mentioned the shutter made the diskette easier to handle, as it didn’t need to be taken in and out of sleeves when used, it was easier to transport in for instance a school bag, because of the more sturdy harder plastic, and the metal shutter is way more solit than the paper sleeve used for floppies. 3 and 3½" also had a tab for enabling write protection and removing it again indefinitely, unlike the clumsy taping over the notch on a 5.25" floppy.
There is no way 3" and 3.5" are called floppy, their correct name is diskette.
Obviously they are not hard disks, that’s even worse than calling them floppies.
But many people already back when they were at their height, misnamed diskettes as floppies, so the more accurate naming scheme never really stuck, and today diskette is called a floppy even on Wikipedia. 🤡
Similarly a drive for 3" and 3,5 inch diskettes is called a diskette drive not a floppy drive, which obviously is for floppies.
Diskettes were frequently called floppies by nearly everyone including manufacturers.
Not originally no, at least not here in Denmark in the mid 80’s. Nobody called them floppy among the people and dealers I knew, and I knew a lot of people who were computer enthusiasts. I also knew several dealers, since we used more than a thousand diskettes per month, to distribute software. I think the bad habit of using wrong terms didn’t really happen until the computer illiterate began to use computers too, either for work or for early internet.
People who called them floppy came later, and were mostly people that might as well have called them thingies.
99.99% of people in the US and UK did.