In Dutch, we always talked about 'diskettes', when talking about the rigid 3.5" disks. The large 5.25" were called floppies. Diskettes were called floppies too sometimes, but never the other way around.

I'm from the time frame in which I never saw 8 inch floppies.

The 5.25" were on the way out, many PCs had both 1.44 and 1.2 MB drives for a while.

/rambling

8" were very floppy. ;-)

We, in Silicon Valley, used "floppies" to mean "5.25 or 3.5 inch disks." (Confusing, yes?)

And, we used "disks" to mean "any type of storage media, fixed or removable."

Also, "diskettes" meant "the formal name of 3.5 inch floppies."

I think this is the same nomenclature.

Yes, I think it's mostly the same with more emphasis in NL on the 'diskettes' but that's about it.

At least in Poland, the PC culture seems to have ended up calling both 5.25" and 3.5" "dyskietka" (lit. "diskette").

"Disk" tended to be encountered in "official" names used by OS software (so, "disk A:" etc.) but at least I never encountered "disk" to refer to anything other than hard drive since ~1992 or so.

Exactly the same for The Netherlands. A diskette/floppy was never a disk. Only hard drives were called disks.

It was/is the same rule in English also. Cheers.

Nothing to be embarrassed about -- it was the golden age of computing! Lucky to have been able to experience it!

No. ALL floppies were called "diskettes" because they were tiny compared to hard disks, which were the usual sort of "disk" up until IBM devised the floppy format for loading boot code into their mainframes.

Sauce: My dad had a Tandy Model 16 with 8" drives (of the Shugart Thinline variety, one of which is pictured in the article!). Tandy sold blank 8" media that were labeled as diskettes. In addition, when the computer booted, if it could not detect a boot disk it would turn the screen white (green) with the words "INSERT DISKETTE" in the middle.

In addition, IBM referred to the 8" floppy format as the "Type 1 Diskette", which nomenclature dates from 1973.

I'm also old enough, and we called both 8 and 5.25 disks, disks. Diskettes came around later, and that nomenclature was far from universal.

My elementary school had 5.25" disks, but 8" was before my time (and really, 5.25" almost is).

3.5" disks were called "disks", but occasionally something would refer to them as diskettes. Diskette was not a normal word for any context.

Haha, good one. I never used 8” disks but I do remember the diskette term going along with floppy disks late 80s/early 90s when I got my first PC. I never put one and one together