Inside a 3.5" floppy hard-shell is a floppy disk that's made of the same (or very similar) floppy material that a 5.25" and 8" floppy is made of. So I think the term is OK.

If I remember correctly, you used to be able to actually take the magnetic material out of the sleeve and it would run in the drive.

You just reminded me of a curiosity that were the DVD-RAM discs - they came in plastic cases with a sliding window(exactly like a floppy) and there were special drives that accepted them in the case. However you could remove it from the case and most regular DVD drives would read and write them without any issues.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD-RAM

My first 1x burner used a cartridge and slot.

Some good coverage on DVD-RAM & caddys from technology connections: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecH3OU0R4ls [DVD-RAM: The Disc that Behaved like a Flash Drive]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxt5A0KJ9nw [Early CD-ROM Drives: Why Did They Require a Caddy?]

The early Apple CDROM drives also took a caddy that you put your disk into.

The proposed Nintendo/Sony CD-ROM was also caddy based.

I just remembered that UMD discs for the PSP came in a plastic case(which stupidly didn't include a sliding window, leading to the discs getting scratched even though they were in the case).

You can technically still do this with 3.5" disks, it's just a invitation for horrible mechanical problems when (not if) the disk touches something it shouldn't or unseats from the drive motor. Also you need to manually push various latches and levers that the sleeve would have run into.

I did one day put a 5 1/4 floppy in the small gap between 2 drive bays. Plonk! Oh well, time to get the screwdriver. I heard it happened a lot at the time.

Also on the Mac II, when the blank hiding the second floppy slot used to fall down. I remember a secretary calling in distress after having inserted 20 floppies or so inside the Mac to no effect: they were all piling up inside, behind the floppy 2 slot :)

Thats ok, anyone who has been a bench tech, field tech, especially in the later 90s to early 2000s, has a similar story to this. Ive had people manage to force CDs between two drive bays and wonder why their CD wasnt being detected. Have had people insert credit cards in floppy drives, etc..

[Edit] there used to be a website, similar to bash.org, that people would submit stories like this all the time of stupid shit they were running into as a tech. Dont recall what it was. There was also and admin site, they may have been the same.

http://rinkworks.com/stupid/ ?

One of the older ones was the daily wtf, still around but not nearly as good as it used to be. There's a subreddit /r/talesfromtechsupport that has become my go-to for that now.

Not on the standard 3.5" but I believe I've seen some (very old very obscure) solutions like that.

The sleeves are rigid; but the disk (of ferrite-dusted plastic) is still floppy.

You kids! It’s called a floppy drive. Back in the day, not even the drives were rigid.

When working on the bleeding edge, it's necessary to be flexible, no matter the era.

This is the best comment here

Always amazes me that people find it necessary to downvote a comment like this

If you prefer a low effort / high noise comment environment that rewards puns, there's always Reddit

HN is not immune to this phenomenon. It just has its own versions.

For what it's worth, I upvoted you. The points are free. Why be stingy?

the 5 1/4" ones were all floppy!

The disc inside is, but I'm not sure the disk as a whole is soft enough to qualify? The casing is definitely not as solid as the 3.5" or 3" ones, but it doesn't exactly flop even if held by a corner. Even folding one in half isn't especially easy.

they were totally soft, you could make a cylinder out of them and after releasing them - they got back in the original state.

"Soft", that's arguable, though I might allow it. But "floppy"? I claim not!

If you hold a 5.25" diskette at the edge, then shake/jerk your hand up and down, it resembles doggy floppy ears.

3” discs could take an eye out.

As were the 8" hard sectored diskettes. Don't forget the write-protect notch.

> Don't forget the write-protect notch.

And don't forget you can notch each side for double the storage!

May not be a great idea: https://stardot.org.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=15189#p204...

```just a word of warning, copy everything off them [commercially-available flippable 5.25" BBC Micro disks] quick, as the 'side2' goes backwards to the cotton cloth cleaner inside the 5 1/4" case, so basically all the crap caught in it then end up coming out when playing other flip side :('''

(No idea how common this phenomenon might have been! - I've always had double-sided drives, so I've always used the other side of the disk in the normal fashion.)

The 1st thing you do on apple II diskettes (5.25") was using a scissors to allow the other side to be writable as well. No exceptions (alternatively you just break the plastic switch that tells if there is copy-write protection, on the floppy driver, itself)

I have taken the floppy out of the sleeves to dry them out as the entirety of my collection fell in the aquarium.

Write protect == hole punch

Writable == tape

Find me someone who used 5.25 who didn’t do this and I’ll fight you.

I punched holes in the corners of my 5.25" disks and kept them in a ring binder.

Then there were things like fdformat ... because software had a very close relationship with the hardware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2M_(DOS)

My first boss out of college had a side job maintaining check encoding machines for a local bank (imagine a room full of these machines, staffed by people who were glad not to be working in a warehouse anymore, who spent their hours typing in the dollar amounts people had scribbled on the paper checks they had written to the supermarket, carwash, dry cleaners, etc.)

These machines ran off a program that was stored on 8" floppies. All the workers had been told to NEVER EVER touch the floppies. Well one night, a disk went bad and had to be replaced. To the horror of the operator, my boss ripped the magnetic media out through the spindle hole, looked at it closely, and proclaimed "Yep. It's bad"

Ah, an obscure catch! Most of the 8" floppies were soft-sectored though I believe the original ones were hard sectored. I only once ever used a hard-sector drive + media.

Yeah I actually had a couple machines that used them. One was an Altos something like this http://www.vintage-computer.com/altos8000acs.shtml and the other was some single cabinet scientific job. I forget if the hard-sectored disks would work in a soft-sectored drive or not; perhaps it would just ignore the holes.

Is that the right term, "sleeve"? I always thought of the "sleeve" on my 5.25" floppies as being the tyvek/paper thingie you stuck the floppy disk inside for safekeeping (ultimately putting both in a case/cabinet - which I still have several).

Maybe the thing I thought of as a "sleeve" (analogous to a album "sleeve") is actually called something else (maybe an "envelope"?) - I never really gave it thought until now, honestly.

The white stuff is the liner.

I picked up a 5 1/4" floppy without the sleeve that was on the side of the road 20 years ago, sliced open another disc sleeve that had bad sectors and replaced it with the found disc. I still had a working XT at the time.

It had The Black Cauldron, PC Jr bootable version on it.

Nice. One time, I brought home a 3.5" disk from elementary school with a copy of Commander Keen 5 on it - the paid one that was so hard to get for a kid with no money and no modem. I somehow managed to leave it on the driveway near the car, overnight, inside of a faux leather wallets of sorts.

It snowed. It was the winter break, so there was no going back to school to see the other kid who had made the copy for me, not for 2 weeks. This was supposed to be my fun game for the break....

So, I carefully opened the disk, set it to dry over the heating vent, put it back together, and with the help of Norton Utilities 5.0's Disk Doctor, I got a mostly playable copy out of it. Absolutely amazing.

I get that this is an ironic take on the semantic reference and the object it represented but I think there is merit in talking about why the obviously-not-floppy 3.5 disk was called "floppy."

At the time, "hard disk" referred to the spinning disk inside the computer & so though "floppy" wasn't technically accurate when referring to the 3.5 inch floppy, it was a nomenclature referring its utility or type rather than a physical description actual object itself.

"Floppies" were the things that you stuck in and removed... didn't matter their covering material, nor what size they were.

It's interesting to think about how many of our words have the same kind of history; once having a widespread descriptive meaning associated with physical traits of the object itself which ultimately were divorced from the original meaning over time...

I'm going to hazard a guess that most of our nouns have that kind of history... but the interesting thing here is that this morphing happened so quickly and it's because the object itself changed, not some generational loss of original meaning...

This kind of thing fascinates me. Another example is the various names we have for types of cars- coupes, sedans, even more obscure ones like 'shooting brake'. These were names for types of horse-drawn carriages, and cars inherited the names as models were released which mimicked some aspects of one type of carriage or another.

Another example is when someone refers to recording something as "taping" it, even though tape as a recording medium is mostly long gone. In their conversations, the term "taping" made the leap from "recording on tape" to simply "recording", and lost its original meaning.

I don't agree. The plastic spinning discs inside a 3.5 were still floppy and discs. We didn't call Bernoulli boxes or Zip drives floppies. Your clue is the word disc. The 3.5 inch disc was inside a rigid case but still a disc and yes floppy.

The first floppies we've had were the 5.25 inch kind which were truly floppy. I remember how strange it felt to hold the new ones which were in a hard case.

I think the 8 inch floppy predates the 5.25 one.

Wikipedia agrees (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_floppy_disk):

8-inch: 1972

5.25-inch: 1976

3.5-inch: 1982

The IBM 23FD (read-only) was released for the System 370 in 1971. The first read-write floppy drive, Memorex 650, was available in 1972.

https://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/1968/

The first time i saw an 8-inch disk, i thought it was some sort of wind-up. But no, there really were disks that big once; my dad had one from some ancient minicomputer he'd worked on at some point.

Father worked at DEC; picked up a PDT-11/150 on discount as a home system. Intended by DEC as an industrial controller.

Low-level LSI-11 processor variant, 128k RAM, (2) 8" floppy drives. The case was 75% floppy drive, 25 % processor boards on top.

Came with RT-11 build floppies, I had to run the OS build in order to generate a boot disk and three language/utility disks. Took about 8 hours to do the full optioning and build from the 13 source floppies.

Ahh, the old days. Wrote my first D&D game, ballistic path analysis, mandelbrot drawn to 80x24 greenscreen VT01...

Early in my career and after a field trip abroad commissioning an aircraft simulator I was stopped at customs with a box of them and was asked what they were worth. Said that we could send the data by modem and so effectively nothing. I was allowed to pass.

I have a stack of 8" floppies sitting on my desk. Also have the old Wang computer they go to laying around. I have not been able to find the actual disk drive though.

Back in the late 80s we had a PL/M development system from Intel we used to program 8051 and 8096 microcontrollers for industrial sensors at Honeywell. The code was saved on 8" floppies.

A photo of that bad boy http://home.kpn.nl/a.dikker1/museum/blauwebak.html

Yep, you could punch holes in them and put them into binders. Their size was just right for this. Supposedly, it was a perfect way to keep them organized.

The TRS-80 Model II used them. Some CP/M microcomputers did too.

I had an old Model II 8" drive I had pulled out of old machine that I used in the Intro to Computing class I taught in the 90's. It made a great prop to show how drives work. The read/write head was about the size of a matchbox.

And in use until recently! https://www.cnbc.com/2016/05/25/us-military-uses-8-inch-flop...

Indeed - the smell of a new flappy diskette - yay more storage.

I remember being confused because all my 3.5” disks were High Density so they had a “HD” stamped on them. I was pretty sure they were hard disks and the old 5.25” were floppy.

Yeah, the 3.5" disks are actually 'stiffies', not 'floppies'.

Yes, that’s what they were known as in South Africa.

Comparatively speaking (to a hard drive) a 3.5" disc is still pretty "floppy."