Re:Windows 96
by hunter2_ on Tuesday July 27, 2021 @11:33PM
(#27979985)
It's been so long since I've seen the word "diskette" that upon seeing it, I just had a crazy a-ha moment: could it be that the convention of "disk=magnetic, disc=optical" is based on the fact that they were all originally discs but the c was changed to k for magnetic media in order to facilitate the spelling of diskette (since discette with a c doesn't really work)? Or put another way, disk is just an abbreviated version of diskette which is a small disc, and therefore a tiny optical disc might also be rightfully called a disk?
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Re:Windows 96
by floatingatoll on Wednesday July 28, 2021 @12:45AM
(#27980326)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edison_Disc_Record
I prefer your explanation, but I suspect it's also a chain of events from "Edison Disc Record" to "Compact Disc". The link is "Audio", absent from both product names.
Maybe it will just be called an "audio" someday! "Hey, I have an audio of that new band Named!" Hooray, it works in a sentence. Sold.
I think it's much simpler:
Diskettes, floppy disks etc were invented in the USA, where the standard spelling is "disk".
Compact discs were invented by Philips, who probably preferred the British spelling "disc", and Sony, who probably didn't care.
You can find the spelling "hard disc" in RISC OS, a 1990s British operating system: https://www.riscos.info/index.php/Introduction_to_RISC_OS#Us...