Fwd: Disk vs. disc

[Wilson Gray]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Travis Butler <tbutler at mac.com>
Date: Mon, Nov 12, 2012 at 8:36 PM
Subject: Re: Disk vs. disc (was Re: License situation for selling
older Mac upgraded to Lion)
To: TidBITS Talk <tidbits-talk at tidbits.com>



On Nov 12, 2012, at 5:01 PM, "Mark D. McKean" <qpanda at quantumpanda.com> wrote:
>
> Honestly, I think the difference comes from the fact that the technologies were developed in different industries. Floppies and hard drives come strictly out of the computing industry, but CDs, DVDs, and Blu-Rays were developed by the entertainment industry to hold media. Their use as data storage is secondary. That doesn't explain why each industry chose the spelling they did, but it at least would explain why they are not the same.

Yep; makes sense to me. The other distinction I'd draw is between
writable and non-writable; all the optical media formats started out
as read-only, and were very inconvenient to write to even after they
became writable. All the 'disks', by contrast, were full read-write
devices.

The 'entertainment media' heritage might explain the disc spelling as
a successor to LP records; as far as I can remember, they were always
called 'discs'.
>



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--
-Wilson
-----
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