I'm going to go mad.

[sabrina@fedi01.unicornsparkle.club]

@thepi @misnina Whether it’s hard or floppy outside doesn’t matter. It’s all about whether it’s hard or floppy inside.

[robbienorlyn@babka.social]

@jordan @misnina There was a brief period of time where 3.5” was the “hard disk” that we had. 8” and 5.25” were the floppies.
The slang evolved as those floppies vanished from normal usage and actual hard drives were becoming the norm. We kept the term floppy for the 3.5” overall and those of us who used hard disk switched to keeping that for hard drives. Also, diskette was pretty common in usage too at that point. But diskette was not only common yet old by that point and referred to floppies also.
People will argue ad nauseam about why they used whatever slang.

[octaviaconamore@cutie.city]

@thepi @misnina right? we always, *always* called them "floppy disks", even in the age of the 3.5" I'm pretty sure I've heard "disk" being used to refer to hard drives, but never floppies

[thepi@urusai.social]

@OctaviaConAmore @misnina The computers themselves often used 'disk' to mean 'any storage medium', including both floppies & hard drives e.g. 'please insert disk 5'. Still do, as far as I know.

But in casual conversation there's more truth to saying that floppy disks were never called discs because they were square and not round.

[hexwren@lesbian.solutions]

@misnina they were in fact the floppies we were directed not to copy

[suihkulokki@society.oftrolls.com]

@misnina In Finnish we call them
Lerppu 5.25" (Floppy)
Korppu 3.5" (Rusk)
Romppu CD-ROM (We just invented this word that has ROM in it and rhymes with previous words)

[michiel@social.tchncs.de]

@robbienorlyn @jordan @misnina someone who wants to be pedantic should not do it halfway. They're not 3.5" diskettes, they're defined as 90mm by ECMA-125:

https://ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/standards/ecma-125/

[cagibidev@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@misnina in French we called them "disquette" (pronounced exactly like "diskette"), a shorter and kinda cute term.

[hrw@society.oftrolls.com]

In Polish any floppy disk was "dyskietka" despite the size (8/5.25/3.5/etc.).

Common jargon phrase was "flop".

You could hear "duża dyskietka" (big floppy) for 5.25" and "mała dyskietka" (small floppy) for 3.5" one. No idea was there a phrase for 8" ones.

@suihkulokki @misnina

[feff@comicscamp.club]

@misnina I once took apart a 3.5" disk because I was a curious child - There *WAS* a floppy disk hidden in that protective case!