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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Joined: Apr 2000
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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if'n you open up a 3½-inch floppy disk (or a 5¼, for that matter), and we did, you get to see the floppy magnetic recording material inside, and we did — and when you flap it, it even makes a floppy sound!
-joe (frappin') friday
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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I was sorry to see the death of the slow mainframe computer. One could go down to the computer room, look at the computer through the large, glass window, and gauge the sort of response time one would get when accessing it from the terminals up on the second floor. And the golden age of digital display was the nixie tube. The anodes were aligned at varying depths when seen from the front and typically not arranged in numerical order. Thus the display of digits, when counting up, as may happen when displaying a changing voltage, would skitter back and forth in a seeming random manner. The tube, of course, is known in British English, which we all know is far superior to the degraded American English, as a valve, despite the fact that it is nothing at all like a folding door.
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Joined: Mar 2000
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Good heavens--I certainly would never have equated (or come close to equating) a valve with "section of a folding or revolving door"! But the etymology sure clarifies the connection; thank you for posting that link.
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Joined: Feb 2008
Posts: 876
old hand
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old hand
Joined: Feb 2008
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ya know, it's sad in a way that the floppy drive (and floppy disk) is going the way of the dodo bird. link it was fun to explain (with props) to a group of neophytes why a 3½-inch floppy disk was called floppy. - joe (show & tell) friday I always thought that a 5 1/4 was a floppy, and a 3 1/2 was a "hard disk", but it's so long ago, my memory might be a bit floppy... ;0)
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Joined: Apr 2000
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Apr 2000
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we're getting into debatable terminology again (though not so complex as linguistics!) -- the term 'floppy' carried over to the smaller (harder?) disk in same way that 'dial' carried over from one generation of telephone to the next. and a hard disk or drive is the big one inside your computer!
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
Joined: Jul 2005
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"Ya know dale..........Natural language change doesn't work that way. There's a Latin example involving repetitions of the string malo.....but no one would have ever spontaneously said it in quotidian speech. You might claim that using the term drive ...... is going to cause confusion, but to the computer and to the computer user the thing...... looks exactly like a hard drive......And nobody's going to be confused........"--Fal
Inevitably the descriptivist defends each and every usage, on the basis of "well, that's just the way a language develops." But the World is full of war, crime, and suffering too. Is it all justified by saying that, well, that's just the way folks are
You seem to defend with equal vehemence the use of "hard drive" to describe a keychain semiconductor random-access memory, for some reason giving me pause so I am wondering if other newly-converted descriptivists in the group might have had the same reaction
[--which I might have called a "keseram"...but thank you for "quotidian", a new one on me, I like it
dalehileman
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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"Ya know dale..........Natural language change doesn't work that way. There's a Latin example involving repetitions of the string malo.....but no one would have ever spontaneously said it in quotidian speech. You might claim that using the term drive ...... is going to cause confusion, but to the computer and to the computer user the thing...... looks exactly like a hard drive......And nobody's going to be confused........"--Fal
You seem to defend with equal vehemence the use of "hard drive" to describe a keychain semiconductor random-access memory, for some reason giving me pause so I am wondering if other newly-converted descriptivists in the group might have had the same reaction
Nope. A hard drive is one with hard disks of a recording medium inside a container of some sort. The device variously known as a thumb drive, a flash drive, or any number of other names is not called a hard drive. The 3-1/2 inch floppy was called a floppy not because it sorta looked like a 5-1/4 inch floppy but because the medium inside the hard case was the same, floppy medium as that in the 5-1/4 inch floppy that happened to be in a more floppy case. One reason for not using the term random access memory might be that one of the features of RAM in modern computers is that the memory is volatile, that is, it doesn't retain the memory when power is lost. Such a feature would make a flash drive totally useless.
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enthusiast
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enthusiast
Joined: Nov 2007
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"Ya know dale..........Natural language change doesn't work that way. There's a Latin example involving repetitions of the string malo.....but no one would have ever spontaneously said it in quotidian speech. You might claim that using the term drive ...... is going to cause confusion, but to the computer and to the computer user the thing...... looks exactly like a hard drive......And nobody's going to be confused........"--Fal
You seem to defend with equal vehemence the use of "hard drive" to describe a keychain semiconductor random-access memory, for some reason giving me pause so I am wondering if other newly-converted descriptivists in the group might have had the same reaction
Nope. A hard drive is one with hard disks of a recording medium inside a container of some sort. The device variously known as a thumb drive, a flash drive, or any number of other names is not called a hard drive. The 3-1/2 inch floppy was called a floppy not because it sorta looked like a 5-1/4 inch floppy but because the medium inside the hard case was the same, floppy medium as that in the 5-1/4 inch floppy that happened to be in a more floppy case. One reason for not using the term random access memory might be that one of the features of RAM in modern computers is that the memory is volatile, that is, it doesn't retain the memory when power is lost. Such a feature would make a flash drive totally useless. Does this exchange suggest that the verb dalehileman as defined in zmjezhd's link is now being used in both an intransitive and a transitive sense?
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
Joined: Jul 2005
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"Ya know dale..................the thing...... looks exactly like a hard drive......And nobody's going to be confused........"--Fal
You seem to defend with equal vehemence the use of "hard drive" to describe a keychain semiconductor random-access memory, for some reason giving me pause.........
Nope. A hard drive is one with hard disks of a recording medium inside a container of some sort. The device variously known as a thumb drive, a flash drive, or any number of other names is not called a hard drive......... Fal sorry if I was not clear but my contention was that the wording of your reply seemed to suggest that if one accepts the term "drive" for the device then he might conceivably have accepted "hard drive" as equally applicable, which notion you now evidently reject However, "One reason for not using the term random access memory might be that one of the features of RAM in modern computers is that the memory is volatile, that is, it doesn't retain the memory when power is lost." is well taken as indeed I should not have called it a RAM, my bad. I had simply made the evidently mistaken assumption that surely the modern RAM might be available also in non-volatile form
dalehileman
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