Unearthed. (UPDATED)
Recently discovered as the excavation of the editor’s old office continues, a form letter to Commonweal‘s book reviewers:
Dear Reviewer,
We would like to enhance the book review section by printing brief, interesting and representative passages from the books being reviewed.
We would appreciate it, therefore, if you would include with your review, on a separate page, a passage from 50 to 75 words which you think the readers would enjoy.
Also, if you are working from a computer, and if it is either McIntosh or uses MS-DOS system, it would be helpful if you would send us both your print-out and your floppy disk (which we would be sure to return to you).
Oops.
Update: Uh oh, Jean Raber. We found more disks. I hope you’re ready to have your world rocked:
Time to rope off the office and call in the archeological experts to excavate and carbon date this potential treasure trove from the Early Microsoftian Era.
Those don’t look like floppies; those look like diskettes, a later development. I’m old. I know.
Nope, I looked again, no holes, no floppies. That would make this a Messo-Microsoftian site rather than a Paleo-Microsoftian site.
Ahem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk
In honor of the principle that no thread on dotCom should be dispute-free, let me weigh in with the notion that those 3.5″ disks, holding a full 1.4 Mb of information, should be credited, not to Microsoft, but to IBM, who, I think, introduced that format with its late, not-very-lamented PS/2 line. (Along with PGA video and, possibly, token ring networks).
Btw, to my kids’ generation, the term PS2 refers to a gaming system with no known link to IBM.
A flexible medium in a non-rigid envelope is called a flexible floppy disk. The initial ‘floppy’ was introduce by IBM in 1971 and held 100,000 bytes on an 8″ diameter medium.
FYI: The big problem with all archival electronic media is drive obsolescence.
Hope you returned those diskettes.
Speaking as someone who has been a computer owner since the late 1970s (and actually did a little computer programming in Fortran and PL/I in the mid-1960s), and whose job has involved computers since 1994, I hearby declare that if it didn’t flop, it wasn’t a floppy disk. And 3.5″ disks didn’t flop. What we see in the photo are disks, not floppy disks. Also, they are disks, not diskettes. A disk is still a disk no matter how small it is, so there is no point in calling any disk of any size a diskette. It is a waste of keystrokes. Also, disk should never be spelled disc. It just doesn’t look right, for one thing.
I remember chatting with a guy who was setting up one of the first computers we had in our offices. This was in the days of 5.25″ floppy disks, and disk drives with “doors.” He told me he had installed a computer for someone who later called him to complained that the disk drive didn’t work. The man had been following the directions to put the disk in the drive and close the door. After some discussion, it turned out that the guy was putting the disk in the drive, getting up, and closing the door to his office.
Grant, Grant. This is a classic reason journalists should not use Wikipedia as a source.
Wikipedia’s picture showing floppies and diskettes together is like showing cavemen fighting dinosaurs or Puritans on the Mayflower dancing the boogaloo.
When floppies (the flexible disks) were going out and diskettes were coming in, the terms were not interchangeable anymore than the size of the drives you put them in.
I hope the content of those discs was examined, perhaps some long-lost quote from Graham Greene or G.K. Chesterton, or Robert Imbelli. You never know!
People: what defines a floppy disk is not the medium’s enclosure. It’s the medium, which is itself flexible. Sorry, David. Sorry, Jean. You’re just wrong.
Jean, we’re young but we’re not THAT young. I well remember when floppy disks were actually floppy. (I’d still be anxious about touching the hole in the middle if I had to handle one today, however irretrievable its data might be.) And I can remember when I had to stop using floppy floppies and start using hard ones. The companies that manufactured them tried out other names (I have a box of Verbatim “microdisks” in my desk at home), but like it or not, people did call the 3×5 disks floppies, right up until they weren’t worth talking about anymore. The technology just goes obsolete too fast for the terminology to keep up. Also, using anachronistic names for things is fun (see also “pigskin”).
I really, really wish I were present for the excavation of Paul’s office.
Mollie and Grant, with utmost respect, you are both high.
I remember being told I had to submit something for a paper on a “floppy,” which I did on the large, flexible device with the hole in the middle. The department chair called me up and said, “Sorry, it has to be a diskette.”
Diskettes may have been called “floppies” out of habit or ignorance of something’s true nature–just like my kid used to call whales fish. But calling something by the wrong name doesn’t make it so.
Moreover Grant’s contention that if you cracked a diskette you’d find something floppy inside, ergo they’re both floppies. Well. That’s like saying that a turtle is the same as a lizard, except that the turtle has a shell on it.
Certainly, if you’re going to break things down to their raw elements, they have similar components, but that doesn’t make them the same thing.
Turtles can’t breed with lizards. Floppy drives aren’t compatible with drives for diskettes.
Two different things.
I wish, but no, I’m as high as you are correct about why floppy disks are called floppy. The first floppy disk was actually 8 inches across. It looked like a bigger version of the 5 and 1/4 disks you seem to believe constitute the form of the floppy disk. I’m sure you were told that you had to submit something on a floppy (apparently by someone else who was confused about this technology), and I’m sure lots of people out there believe that only those 5 and 1/4 disks are called floppy because–hey, they bend! And when Apple introduced the 3.5 inch floppy, I can remember people, ahem, of a certain age (POW!) having some trouble calling those disks floppies because–hey, they don’t bend! But the enclosure isn’t the point. The enclosure simply protects the medium storing your precious data. And what’s inside of those 3.5 inch shells is simply a smaller version of the 5 and 1/4 disks–hole and all.
Jean, there’s a point at which prescriptivist linguistics has to give way to descriptivist linguistics. We are long past that point with floppy disks. Even the American Heritage Dictionary illustrates its entry on “floppy disk” with a picture of a 3×5. (And here’s how it defines your preferred term: “Diskette: n. See ‘floppy disk.’“) You can stick to your preferred usage, and if you want you can be one of those people who likes to point out that “Pennsylvania is actually not a state, it’s a commonwealth.” But “floppy” is standard usage. Take it up with the dictionary.
“there’s a point at which prescriptivist linguistics has to give way to descriptivist linguistics”
Splendidly put, Mollie. It’s all Plato’s fault. He thought there was some one ideal reality and one word which named it, so wisdom required us to seek “the real” meaning of a given term. As an English major, I discovered that even the smartest scholars don’t realize that Plato and most everybody else are wrong. For instance, fine scholars spent generations trying to find “the real meaning” of “the Baroque”. One of them finally realized it was a family resemblance term, sort of like “floppy disk”, I’d say.
Please note the update for the checkmate.
Does this mean that I can eat whale on Fridays during Lent?
Grant, Mollie (and now Ann), I don’t care what’s in them pictures you New Yorkers took with your hundred dollar digital cameras over your brie and Perrier at lunchtime.
God didn’t give us the word “floppy” to describe something that don’t bend, and all your fancy talk about descriptive linguistics isn’t gonna make them dinky DISKETTES bend like the big floppy disks did!
And while we’re on travesties against nature, who decided call something that’s square a DISK, which, as we all know, is supposed to be something ROUND. Not something I can lay at your door, but I bet dollars to donuts you’ll argue that if you take a floppy or a diskette apart, you’ll find something round IN it.
Clearly all this has revealed some type of latent literalist/fundamentalist tendency in my thinking process, so I hope you’re happy now!
Jim, no.
Remind me never to take any of you along on a dig again. You’re wasting precious time arguing about the floppy/disk distinctions. Let archeologists debate that for years to come in scholarly journals. I’m most curious to know if there are any late first century AD mummified remains under the debris on that desk.
Am I that predictable, Jean?
http://www.geek-speak.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/remove-disk.jpg
Jean, just one correction ot your fine rant: in Manhattan, it’s the Perrier and brie that costs $100. The feller in that electronics store on Broadway sold me a digital camera for a heckuva lot more than $100.
William – I’m predicting they’ll find an ossuary incribed with “James, the brother of Jesus, the brother-in-law of Mary Magdalene”, as well as Noah’s Ark, the Ark of the Covenant, and possibly Alan Arkin.
The summer after I graduated from college, I stayed at Princeton, and ended up working as a secretary for the Department of Near Eastern Studies. I typed, from dictaphone tapes, the first draft of Bernard Lewis’s Semites and Anti-Semites on a Wang word processor. It wasn’t a computer–it was a word processor only. I think it had a floppy floppy disk–but I can’t remember.
At any rate, I thought the Wang was the greatest thing ever!
I thought it couldn’t get any better than that.
Cathleen – about the time you were doing that, I was supporting a Wang competitor, also long gone now, called NBI. As you say, not a personal computer – a word processor workstation. What had been the typing pools of our grandparents’ and parents’ generations became Wang word processing centers.
Before Microsoft Office existed and became a near-monopoly, there was a fine DOS-based word processing program called Multimate that utilized all of the Wang keystrokes (I think I’m recalling this correctly – it was either Multimate or Wordstar). So if you were already a Wang expert – in those days, there were tens of thousands of such folks, mostly women – and your employer was switching over to the newfangled PCs, you could be instantly productive.
I have a handful of those things that I hate to throw away, their being repositories of my work history and my wrathful rantings to publications since the early 1980s.
Now, if I just knew how to access them in this day and age —
I am going to move to a position somewhere in between Grant and Jean. In my experience, it was considered a blunder to call a 3.5″ disk a “floppy,” and I still wouldn’t do it. But Jean brings up a point that hurts her case. Both the flexible enclosure of a 5.25″ disk and the hard plastic enclosure of the 3.5″ disk were square. The disks were inside the enclosures and were round. So it would make sense, when saying “floppy disk,” to be describing the disk itself, no matter what the properties of what encloses it. Also, the fact that the totally enclosed, high-capacity storage device for computers is called a hard disk, even though you haven’t a clue what shape it is unless you destroy the enclosure, does imply that it’s the thing inside that is being described (both as a disk and as hard).
I see the makings of a graduate thesis in these here comments!
I’m waiting for someone to quote Wittgenstein.
…or start a game of ‘Mornington Crescent’.
Teaching children about computers in the ’80s, I always made a point of showing them the flexible circles inside the containers. I guess I spent too much time with picture books that taught the difference between circles and square to let those rectangular cases be called discs. I was afraid those kids would grow up to be as confused as the people here.
And, while diskettes are indeed disc-shaped, 3.5″ diskettes are smaller than 5.25″ or 8″ disks, hence the term diskette.
David N – check out the pix above of 5 1/4″ diskettes – the labels, and especially the handling instructions on the back of the envelope. Clearly, in the eyes of the manufacturers and vendors of the products, the entire product – the media inside, and the outer cover, constituted the product called the “diskette”.
I forget now who was claiming otherwise.
Jim, M., “Teaching children about computers in the ’80s …” is an opener that makes me want to give my kid my PC and cellphone, move into an assisted living facility with my vinyl records, Henry James novels, and Marx Brothers movies that I can view on my analog TV on magnetic VCR tapes.
Antonio, I’ve never seen “Mornington Crescent,” but Stephen Fry’s “QI” seems like a likely forum for this type of info.
For the rules of the Mornington Crescent game, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mornington_Crescent_(game)
Antonio –
Here’s something by Wittgenstein about rules. He’s saying it in class, and the subject is whether or not rules that lead to contradictions are important. He’s talking to Alan Turing:
“I may give you the rules of chessmen without telling you that you have to stop at the edge of the chessboard. If the case arises that a man wishes to make a piece jump off the chessboard, we can then say, “No, that is not allowed.” But this does not mean that the rules were either false or incomplete.–Remember what was said about counting. Just as one has freedom to continue counting as one likes, so one can interpret the rule in such a way that one may jump off the board or one may not.
“But it is vitally important to see that a contradiction is not a germ, which shows general illess.”
(Wittgenstein’s Lectures on the Foundation of Mathematics, Cambridge 1939) p. 210-211.)f
Turing objects that if there is a contradiction in arithmetic applying it could result in a bridge falling down. Wittgenstein is not impressed. Yes, this is one of his most controversial notions.
Later in this work Wittgenstein considers what might happen if a general gives orders to different subordinates to be at different places at different times, and some of the orders are inconsistent. I wonder if the inventors of Mornington Crescent might have been familiar with this work.
Then there’s the late Wittgenstein’s meaning of “meaning”: “The meaning of a word is its use”. Sorry, Jean.
“But it is vitally important to see that a contradiction is not a germ, which shows general illess.”
(Wittgenstein’s Lectures on the Foundation of Mathematics, Cambridge 1939) p. 210-211.)f
Turing objects that if there is a contradiction in arithmetic applying it could result in a bridge falling down. Wittgenstein is not impressed. Yes, this is one of his most controversial notions.
Deep stuff. In the chessboard example, assume the rules are silent on whether or not the pieces are to remain the board surface. A player who objects to such a move is simply playing a different game than his opponent — as in life.
Similarly, if the bridge falls down because of a supposed inconsistency (however defined) in the rules of mathematics, the builder used a tool (mathematics) which turned out to be inappropriate to the task at hand. Caveat emptor.
I wonder if the inventors of Mornington Crescent might have been familiar with this work.
Could be. I like the absurdist flavor of the game, which catches the unintended labryinths and traps built by axiomatic reason and logic.
Well, if we’re going to get into uber linguistics here …
I once wrote a paper about the theory that English is essentially a creole language–Anglo-Saxon grammar with French and Latin grafted on, and Anglo-Saxon inflections leveling over centuries of use, though that’s dumbing down the creolizing process quite a bit.
Suffice it to say, that the origins of English make it a far more flexible (perhaps even FLOPPY) language, and that English speakers feel free to invent, borrow or otherwise revamp rules and words very quickly. American English, with no end of immigrants to borrow things from, is especially flexible, a fact bemoaned by my international students. Though if they stick around long enough, they get into the spirit of the thing and enjoy adding their own native words to the mix.
So I accept that in less than a generation, Younger People in Sophisticated Metropolitan Areas, whose version of English is becoming ascendant Standard English, can fail to distinguish between a floppy and a diskette and even, between nibbles on their brie and Triscuits, claim there never WAS such a distinction.
But I don’t have to like it.
FWIW, I enjoy making language predictions for my students. One of which is that “alot” will become standard usage before I croak. It’s already in the dictionary as a nonstandard form of “a lot,” which most students ignore: “It’s in the DICTIONARY, Mrs. Raber, so you can’t mark it wrong!”
Yeah kids (and Mollie), the DICTIONARY also doesn’t know the difference between a floppy and a diskette, either.
Another prediction is that we will lose apostrophes, at least to denote genetive case. Heck, when I proof my own work, I’m astounded at how often I’ve begun to drop apostrophe’s to show possession.
But enough of this airy persiflage, as Robert Conrad used to say on “Rocky and Bullwinkle.” The heat is back today, and the cats and I are going to repair to the screen porch to read “Harpo Speaks!” and drink iced coffee.
And, OMG, as proof of the demise of the apostrophe, lookit this: “… begun to drop apostrophe’s”
My cats don’t care for iced coffee. I have yet to elicit their opinion on Harpo Speaks, Harpo Marx or Harpo Studios. If any of the above serve cat food and leave outside doors open, they’ll be in favor of it.
“Suffice it to say, that the origins of English make it a far more flexible (perhaps even FLOPPY) language. . .”
Jean –
But what do you MEAN by “floppy”? (Sorry, there’s such a thing as too much Wittgenstein.)
Actually, I’m with you — I *hate* to see some of the changes. It’s a good thing to *add* words, it’s another to weaken old uses. The worst, I think, is using the pronoun “that” instead of “who”, as in “the saint that was martyred by being sawed in half. . . “. Surely a hero deserves to be distinguished from a plank of wood. Last week I saw such a use in the NYT itself, and I was scandalized. Language does matter, especially when people are de-personalized by degenerate uses of it.
I don’t care about grammar much. English grammar has always been totally irrational anyway, so why not follow your own silly rules, as in Mornington Crescent which delights Antonio so much :-)
Ann, you made me laugh out loud: “Surely a hero deserves to be distinguished from a plank of wood.”
Yes, the who/that distinction drives me batty–or did until I started teaching freshman comp and rhetoric again and saw far more frightening things.
Actually, I feel responsible for introducting Wittgenstein into the thread, without first asking for opinions on what the Scholastics might have had to say on the issue of floppy disk essences, ontology and the like.
As to Mornington Crescent, although the metaphysical basis of the game is complex to the point of incomprehensibility, I can safely say that the rules of the game are definitely not the product of any one person’s arbitrary ‘silly rules’. As one compendium of the rules shows (http://kevan.org/morningtonia.pl?A_To_Z), the world of Mornington Crescent is orderly, albeit somewhat impenetrable.
The discussion of the Adams Precedent from the encyclopedia illustrates the daunting complexity confronted by those attempting to distill the many variants of the game into one synoptic set of rules.
As famously observed by [Douglas Adams]?, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and subsequent books, “Time is an illusion; lunchtime doubly so.” It has been the fate of more than one Mornington Crescent Working Committee to be commissioned to study a particular part of the game – the Green Line Bus Interchange Check, for example – meet once, and then never be heard from again.
This is generally assumed not to be due to foul play, but because of the Adams Precedent. Adams noted that ‘an early editor of the [Hitchhiker's] Guide, famous for taking very long lunch breaks, left for lunch late one morning and has yet to return. It is hoped and assumed that he will yet return and put in a solid afternoon’s work, and his desk has been left completely untouched save for a small sign which says “Lig Lury Jr., Editor. Missing, presumed fed.”‘ Mornington Crescent Committees disappearing under similar circumstances are said to be following Adams’ Precedent.
“Morningstar Crescent” sounds like something made up by Vogons. I hope they don’t have poetry.
“Morningstar Crescent” sounds like something made up by Vogons. I hope they don’t have poetry.
Actually, there appear to be a number of extraterrestrial Origin Myths, which knowledgeable experts have convicingly debunked — particulary those involving so-called Intelligent Design. One would be hard put to ascribe design of any sort, let alone intelligent design, to any aspect of the game.
At the end of the day, a rose by any other name is still a rose and thus it would smell so sweet.
Changes in language are much like changes in religion. Conservatives want things to remain the same, progressives want things to be more ‘floppy’.
I mention this only to point to Jean’s “conservative” remark “I accept that in less than a generation, Younger People in Sophisticated Metropolitan Areas, whose version of English is becoming ascendant Standard English, can fail to distinguish between a floppy and a diskette.” As often happens, this attempts to “conserve” a mistaken notion of what is. Diskettes always were floppy, despite their hardened shell, and conserving the distinction is actually change, not conservation.
So God played Mornington Crescent with creation? Einstein, I bet, wouldn’t agree. But, then his theory does seem to involve contradictions with other theories, anyway.
Walt Whitman wrote Mornington Crescent poetry: “I contradict myself?? Very well, then/I contradict myself.” He was bonkers too.
Once you add a false assumption to The Truth, you change The Truth, you do not conserve The Truth.
If a rose that is no longer a rose, it would not smell as sweet.
Jim McKay, I hope that a light-hearted exchange about the distinction between floppy and diskette–a distinction no longer needed in our vocabularies today, because we’ve all got flash drives (even ME!), but one I still make because I remember when that distinction WAS important–has not established me as some kind of ossified doctrinairian. Because if it has, the doctrinarians are in a a good deal of trouble.
“If a rose that is no longer a rose, it would not smell as sweet.”
Well, I think that just about sums up everything that’s been said on this thread and it’s time to say happy trails to all and thanks for all the fish!
oops, that should actually read, If a rose is no longer a rose, it would not smell as sweet.
“Actually, I feel responsible for introducting Wittgenstein into the thread, without first asking for opinions on what the Scholastics might have had to say on the issue of floppy disk essences, ontology and the like.”
… And don’t think for a moment, sir, that it wasn’t noted! :-)