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

[kengr]

You can use the actual disk, without the rectangular covering. I've done it (though I wouldn't recommend it).

The disk is some flexible plastic coated with the magnetic "stuff". (technical term :-)

Hard disks are metal platters coated with the same sort of "stuff".

Before them, were drums. Cylinders coated with "stuff".

And then, of course, there was magnetic tape, punch cards and paper tape.

[jessie_c]

I remember all the warnings against getting fingerprints on the actual floppy parts, which is why they came with nice Tyvec envelopes to put them in.

[calimac]

I'm reminded of a similar confused evolution over the word 'album' as in record albums.

[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.

[gatheringrivers]

That sentence seems like it's written by someone who's NEVER SEEN either an 8in OR 5.25in floppy, since the whole thing is floppy, lol. I can understand the confusion with a 3.5in, though, if they've never cracked a dead one open out of curiosity. :)

doubly weird, as some of the 5.25in is in the article picture...

[conuly]

You're misreading that sentence.

[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)

[conuly]

But how did you use the disk itself without the covering!?

[kengr]

You stick your thumb in the center hole, and very lightly press a finger against the outer edge of the disk, The you carefully slide it into the slot. Once it's fairly in, you can just press on the edge.

Getting it out is a bit trickier, you have to pinch a bit of the outer edge to pull it out, but there's enough unused space that far out on the disk that it's unlikely to mess anything up.

[silveradept]

The floppy disks were still floppy even when the casing around them became much less so, but that confusion was a pretty regular thing, even for people who grew up with the things themselves.

[conuly]

I expect a minimum level of research from journalists.