The 401st Blow :: Thoughts On Media

The Internet, On A Disc

Posted in Humor, Technology by Noah Harlan on March 3, 2011
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7 Responses

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  1. Erik said, on March 4, 2011 at 3:36 pm

    Darn it Microsoft! I just got rid of that Floppy Drive.

  2. J.Emmett Turner said, on March 4, 2011 at 7:52 pm

    That’s a floppy diskette. Not a compact disc. Notice the spelling difference. “Disk” does not equal “Disc.” I’m just geeky enough for it to ruin the joke.

  3. Noah Harlan said, on March 4, 2011 at 8:12 pm

    Disc is perfectly acceptable in this situation. “Disk” does, in fact, equal “Disc”. From Wikipedia:

    Spelling of disc
    From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

    Disc and disk are the two alternative spellings of the descriptive word for things of a generally thin and circular geometry. These variations are due to the way in which the words originated. The discussion here somewhat focuses on how the word applies to data-storage media. See Disc (disambiguation) for other meanings.
    The earlier word is disk, which came into the English language in the middle of the 17th century, and (probably following pre-existing words such as risk) it was spelled with a k. The spelling disc was introduced in the 18th century, following an increasing tendency to base the spelling of words on their roots: in this case the Latin word discus and the Greek word δισκος (note that kappa in Greek is usually transliterated by c rather than k). In the 19th century, disc became the conventional spelling for audio recordings made on a flat plate, such as the gramophone record; this usage gave rise to the modern term disc jockey.[1][dead link] Early BBC technicians differentiated between disks (in-house transcription records) and discs (the colloquial term for commercial gramophone records, or what the BBC dubbed CGRs).[2]
    By the 20th century, the c-spelling was more popular in British English, while the k-spelling was preferred in American English. In the 1950s, when the American company IBM pioneered the first hard disk drive storage devices, the k-spelling was used. Consequently, in computer jargon today it is common for the k-spelling to refer mainly to magnetic storage devices (particularly in British English, where the term disk is sometimes regarded as a contraction of diskette, a much later word and actually a diminutive of disk).

    Some latter-day storage device manufacturers prefer the c-spelling. In 1979 the Dutch company Philips, along with Sony, developed the compact disc medium; here, the c-spelling was chosen. The c-spelling is now used consistently for optical media such as the compact disc and similar technologies.[3]

  4. Myk said, on March 5, 2011 at 9:10 pm

    w00t! No more need for the USB drive. Huh?

  5. Anonymous said, on March 7, 2011 at 11:01 am

    And the disk is write-protected!

  6. Phil said, on March 8, 2011 at 8:28 am

    no pr0n included!


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