this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2023
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"Firmware" is a terrible name, it's exactly software.
I disagree. Firmware originally referred to things in ROM or EEPROM. Basically software that is firmly in place and doesn't change, providing an abstraction layer between the hardware and software.
This treats the software as if it were a physical chip which can't be practically changed due to the physics of microchips. The imutability of the storage medium is just a choice of the manufacturer. Sometimes this is a good cost saving feature and sometimes this so they can include anti-features such as preventing repairing your device (e.g. OneWheel).
I'm just telling you where the word comes from. It's like floppy disks, the 3.5mm ones weren't floppy but that's still what we called them because they once were. Firmware used to be something you couldn't easily change. It sits between the hardware and the software. What exactly would you call it if you think the term is bad?
Honestly, I think you're wrong here, they were colloquially called floppy disks because at the time the whole thing was floppy. If the first floppy disks came in hard casings, they would never have been called floppy disks
Take apart a 3.25" floppy disk, you'll find the magnetic platter (disc shaped thing) is floppy.
Take apart a hard disk drive, you'll find the magnetic platter(s) inside are metal.
If a floppy disk wasn't named after the thing inside the casing, why wasn't it called a floppy square or floppy rectangle?
It actually was originally a floppy diskette, but eventually shortened to disk because people are lazy
There's also the term Floppy Disk Drive, as opposed to Hard Disk Drive.
Diskette is a portmanteau of Disk and Cassette. The drive doesn't read the cassette, it reads the disk inside the cassette. It doesn't spin the cassette, it spins the disk inside the cassette. Hence Floppy Disk Drive. Sure calling the actual Disk+Cassette object as just "disk" is a little lazy, but calling it a floppy diskette is not lazy because the disk inside is floppy, and the the disk is the most important component of a diskette.
You're splitting hairs at this point. SSDs used to be a type of hard drive, but now people reserve the term hard drive for platter disks, even though the word came from hard vs. soft storage, which was meant to distinguish between removable and non removable storage.
Zip discs aren't called floppy despite the inside being the same as a floppy
If you search online, it's a debated topic, but if you were alive long enough ago there wasn't always this debate. They were floppy because the thing in your hand was floppy, people only debated it when those were no longer commonplace. IBM didn't even call the 3.5 one a floppy, everyone else did
Yeah I was alive long enough to have had a 5 1/4 floppy disk drive. In fact two of them, which made it more convenient to play Sid Meir's Pirates of of the Caribbean. Save on one disk drive, load game data from the other. Elite level gaming rig for the 80s.
And yeah, I also found it confusing that 3 1/2 floppies being called floppy disks. At least until I had a disk go bad and took one apart. Yup, floppy disk inside the protective case.
SSD are still a thing? They're basically standard for a PC nowadays. Are you talking about hybrid drives which were a combo of a SSD and an HDD?
Anyway, why are they called SSD instead of HDD? Solid State Drive as opposed Hard Disk Drive. No disk in the name because the device doesn't use disks. So it's neither a hard or floppy disk drive as the name indicates. I suppose you might split hairs over them being called a drive, since there's no moving parts to actually be driven, but at this point drive is just a commonly used name for storage devices. Like "footage" being used for video that's not on film.
But anyway I think you're trying to prove that the name floppy was a bad name to describe a 3 1/5" floppy disk, despite the fact that the actual disk that the data was saved on was indeed floppy, only the protective case wasn't. Maybe nowadays the protective case would be considered more relevant by a marketing department, but back in those days actual engineers named things. To an engineer, the actual disk that data was saved on is more important than the protective case the disk is contained within.
I think you misunderstood what I was saying about SSDs. SSDs are not considered "Hard Drives" any more, colloquially a hard drive now specifically means platter disks, and therefore SSDs are not hard drives. I very much disagree with it, but that's how language evolved. To me, they are hard drives, because they're still hard storage media, but the general consensus is that all hard drives have disk platters.
I'm not trying to prove that it was a bad name for 3 1/4" floppies, just that the name came from the casing, not the disk medium, and carried forward colloquially because they weren't very different from their floppy predecessors
Nope it came from the housing, it was originally called a diskette. The disk itself isn't really floppy tbh, more bendy. But the old diskettes were floppy af
Device functionality software, which is low-level? Probably won't win any minds.
Besides, if we (and others reading) know what concepts each other is referring to then it really doesn't matter what word we use.
Firmware is easier to say, at a company I worked at we also called FPGAs gateware which was both interesting and convenient
It's closer to the hardware. Generally harder to update. It's less frequently updated. And it's less fault tolerant.
Idk, sure, it's technically software. But it's pretty clearly at least a distinct subsection that deserves it's own moniker.
The only common thing between software and firmware is the coding part. Everything else is different. Fault tolerance, memory management, MCU optimization, etc.