Hahaha. My university actually taught assembly on Tandy CoCos.
And yes, we saved our work on cassettes back then too.
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Floppies? We used to dream of floppies!
First computer I used was a PDP11/70 with punch cards. I think 8" floppies might have been available at the time but as a young-un I certainly had no access to a drive for them
First computer I owned was a Sinclair/Spectrum ZX-80/1 (branding was a bit “iffy” here in Australia). I can (and will) rant at length about my hatred of membrane keyboards because of this.
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it’s remarkable to think you might still scratch your back with 'em…
can’t even get my head round what I actually used them for…
all I remember was getting single images on say 500mb… thumb drive…
was considered useful for sharing with friends
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The only issue I had with the Amiga’s floppy drive, is that it was “Double Density”, not the “High Density” that IBM PCs were using. So, to transfer files from the school computers (they had a single machine with internet access), I had to copy them off the 1.44MB disks, and onto the Amiga’s 880k disks (although they’d be in PC format, so it would only be 720k) on a separate machine, before I could put them in my Amiga.
Eventually I found out how to split zip files, which saved me no end of time trying to copy anything larger than 720k.
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I’m using one on my desk as a coaster right now!
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I have fond memories of the 3.5" drives on the Macintosh, though most other computer manufacturers never implemented the same feature as the Mac had: software disk ejection. I still have the Commodore 64 and the VIC 1541 drive I got with it, but the 5.25" floppies are long gone. The 3.5" floppies are still there, as well as a box of Zip disks and a couple of Jaz disks.
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I wonder about that too, but I think it was an interchangeable spelling that nobody agreed on. I also grew up in Canada and we called them all “disks”, but then CDs were Compact Discs, which I never understood.
Since you mention cost, I vividly remember how much a floppy cost in the early days. They were precious! I’d save my allowance for months to buy a box of ten 5.25" floppies, and that was a very exciting thing, to have no storage anxiety for a while longer. I don’t have any of my early programming efforts on the Apple II anymore because the floppies at the time were way too valuable not to reuse for newer things.
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Ha, I recently saw an article or some such using this spelling and it really leaped out at me, I was convinced that was a homonym mistake but apparently both spellings were used.
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Disks is short for diskettes (not discettes) and compact discs were a replacement for what were previously called discs (vinyl discs) not disks, before they were used for data and became disks. Hence the difference. I trust that’s clear. 
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I have… memories of working with Aldus Pagemaker on the first Macintosh, without a harddrive.
“Insert program disk” - typetypetype clicketyclickety - “Insert data disk” - typetypetype clicketyclickety - “Insert program disk” - typetypetype clicketyclickety - “Insert data disk” - typetypetype clicketyclickety - “Insert program disk” - typetypetype clicketyclickety - “Insert data disk” - typetypetype clicketyclickety - “Insert program disk” - typetypetype clicketyclickety - “Insert data disk” - typetypetype clicketyclickety -
all the livelong day…
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I mean, sure, that logic follows, but that didn’t stop people from interchanging both words for floppies. 
I guess we’re wondering if it was a regional thing like soda and pop, or what.
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Here, the convention was to use “disk” for computing, and disc for all other instances of the word. Then computers started using optical discs for storage, and the convention got confusing.
The reasoning I was told for the spelling disconnect was that disc was the UK/Commonwealth spelling of the word, and disk was the American spelling. The dominance of the computer industry by American firms meant that the “k” was used in that context. I don’t know how true this is, but it seemed to make sense at the time.
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Not true. See my earlier post. (Which basically said much the same as your first paragraph - and was as true in the UK as anywhere else.)
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Same for the Atari ST, I remember DD disks being hard to find by the mid 90s.
Weirdly, I have a Commodore branded HD 3.5" disk here:
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The last Amigas, the A4000s, came with high density drives that could handle 1.44MB MS-DOS disks. Presumably the only reason for this would be because Commodore had a shed-load of them in a skip from their PC business.
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Commodore built PCs for a while, they probably shipped some software on their own branded disks.
Some of their PCs were actually pretty good machines for the time and they were competitively priced against the competition. Not that it saved the company in the long run as everyone was in a race to the bottom and it was the ones with the deepest pockets who were going to survive.
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Matt Groening once explained that in a" Life in Hell" cartoon. “They’re called compact disks because they are disc-shaped and we made a compact with the devil.”
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C-64 with a 1541… What memories. I also remember buying the “cheaper” single-sided disks, and using a square punch to turn them into “flippies” by cutting a write-enable notch on the other side of the disk. You could then put the disk in upside-down and write to it. It worked for many brands because the manufacturers used the same disks inside their SSDD and DSDD disks.
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