Oh, sheesh

[conuly]

The original 8in (20cm) and 5.25in (13cm) floppy disks were actually floppy – you could bend them slightly without harming the magnetic material inside.

"The magnetic material inside" is the disk. It's round, it's floppy - what more do you want? The etymology is pretty damn transparent! All that square stuff on the outside is just the casing, because manipulating the disk itself would be silly and difficult and... honestly, I'm not sure how you could do that.

Now I'm questioning whether or not this person understands where the word "disk" comes from in the first place.

Comments

[hudebnik]

and mercury delay lines, and ...

I've personally used paper tape (at a high school summer enrichment program), 8" and 5.25" floppy disks (at a job the summer between high school and college), punch cards (in class for my freshman year of college), magnetic tape (at a college co-op job), and 3.5" "floppy" disks (the disks with the magnetic stuff are still floppy, but the casings are rigid). And of course hard disks ever since.

[kengr]

I skipped mercury delay lines (and a couple other things) because they aren't long term storage. More like RAM. Turn off the syste and whatever was in there is gone.

I started out with punch cards in a no credit college class I got referred to in high school. I think that was 71-72.

Got more punch card experience in college. As well as paper tape on some teletype terminals used to access a time sharing system .

Cassette tapes my my TRS-80s in the 80s. And floppy disks as well. Had a system that had 8" floppies for a while (still have a few disks). Lots of 5.25" systems, and 3.5" systems. Still have a *lot* of disks I need to recover files from.

Also have an Intel magnetic bubble kit. and a 256 byte core plane from a mainframe. That's the same size as a 5.25" floppy. But you can *see* the bits. Tiny ferrite donuts.

Various sorts of memory cards, and USB drives. And several NAS boxes of various capacity (one has a 16 TB HD in it)