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Comment by bdcravens | Hacker News Reader

Totally a tangent, but it's interesting that we still refer to things as "disk space" even in the era of flash storage

I know! But I wanted to write something very clear, and I chose the clearest word in my mind to convey my idea. That word is steeped in old tech, it so happens.

Oh and by the way, I was shopping for a cheap laptop for a non-profit this week, and I still had to be careful to pick a laptop with an SSD. Those spinning horrors are still jammed into laptop cases to this day.

Many words are like this. Music albums haven’t been actual albums for decades. Now we barely remember how a collection of songs was distributed as multiple shellac 78 RPM records stored in an album.

That's how language works. We call people "engineers" who have never and will never work on any engines.

"engineer" comes from ingenium (mind, talent) in Latin.

Engineer in most latin languages would be a completely different word to Engine (usually Motor)

engineer

/ɛndʒɪˈnɪə/

Origin:

"Middle English (denoting a designer and constructor of fortifications and weapons; formerly also as ingineer ): in early use from Old French engigneor, from medieval Latin ingeniator, from ingeniare ‘contrive, devise’, from Latin ingenium (see engine); in later use from French ingénieur or Italian ingegnere, also based on Latin ingenium, with the ending influenced by -eer."

This is also where the term 'civil engineer' comes from [1]. It was civilian-focused "engineering" of fortifications like bridges or roads. I've wondered for a while if there was any controversy around the first use of the term "electrical engineer" or "chemical engineer" like how there was with software engineering not being considered "real engineering" around 10 years ago, but I can't really find any information on that.

[1] https://www.britannica.com/technology/civil-engineering

I wonder what a better term for disk storage would be. Block storage, in the way that cloud services refer to it? Just plain "storage"?

Non Volatile Memory

Volatile Memory gets “erased” when powered off

Accurate, and in usage in technical circles already. But I've always found it awkward, and names based on what something is not are always unsettling to me.

Then just Memory. That’s what elderly and nontechies usually call it. And it’s correct. Even more correct with always-on-computing and automatic state saving

Wait until people confuse that with NVRAM.

In the old Multics papers it was just long term storage as there was no difference between segments in memory and on disk. Which we are finally starting to catch up with 50 years later.

"Stable storage", perhaps; I seem to remember the SMTP RFC uses that name.

"Drive" is probably the best option

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