Etymology of the use of "Drive" to refer to a digital storage medium


When did the word "drive" begin to be used to refer to a digital storage medium (e.g. disc drive, hard drive, USB drive), and why was this term selected?



Cross-link to related earlier question: "Hard disk" vs. "Hard drive" vs. "Hard disk drive"



Answer



Originally, the drive was not the storage device. It was the mechanism that you mounted the storage device onto.¹ Spools of tape were mounted on the motor spindle of a tape drive, and disk packs and floppy disks were mounted on the motor spindle of a disk drive. The drive imparted to them a spinning motion:



As disk technology matured, it became common for disks to be permanently sealed and non-removable – that is, the disk and the drive became one device. People referred to this device informally as either the disk or the drive. It also became common to refer to it as the hard drive to distinguish it from the floppy drive installed in the same cabinet.²


When companies came along with devices which performed the same function as sealed disk drives, they called them drives too, in order to make clear that they were marketing disk drive replacements: RAM drives, ZIP drives, USB drives, thumbdrives. And when remote file storage functionally replaced these storage devices, it often got the drive label as well: network drive, Google Drive, OneDrive.³


In short, while the word drive still has its original meaning, it now also has a figurative meaning: it can refer to any storage device that takes the place of a traditional storage drive.


Many end users have begun referring to the entire tower or system unit of a personal computer as the hard drive, a further broadening of the term.⁴


Notes


For more about the history of disk drives, see the Wikipedia article “History of hard disk drives”. Much of what I’ve written here also relies on personal knowledge: I have been in the industry for 40 years.




  1. Drive in this original sense is attested in American English by Collins English Dictionary:



    • Drive, American English sense 28, “a device that communicates motion to a machine or machine part”. (Collins)

    • See also the example in American English sense 27a, “any apparatus that transmits power in a motor vehicle: a gear drive”. (op. cit.)




  2. The derivative, computing-specific senses of drive are also attested by Collins. You can see the progressive shift of meaning from the device that transmits motion to the assembly as a whole:



    • Drive, American English sense 29, “(computing) a unit that reads and writes data on magnetic tape, a disk, etc.” (op. cit.)

    • Disk drive, “(computing) the controller and mechanism for reading and writing data on computer disks”. (Collins)

    • Hard drive, “hard disk, or the part that contains the hard disk … a computer drive for hard disks, often, specif., such a drive as distinguished from a floppy-disk drive in the same computer”. (Collins)




  3. See for example in Collins:



    • Thumb drive, “a thumb-sized portable computer hard drive and data storage device”. (Collins)




  4. This usage is not yet attested by a dictionary, but is frequently attested by professionals in information technology who work with the public. Representative samples from the wild:



    He said he was having a problem with a port on the hard drive... of course he'd actually blown the controller chip on his USB card and the hard drive was just fine (Urban Dictionary, 2003)


    When I used to do IT support, the terms "CPU" and "hard drive" were common. As an IT guy I cringed, but at least I knew what people were talking about. (English Language & Usage, 2014)


    the blinking lights I'm seeing on my hard drive 2 blinks pause then 3 blinks pause (personal correspondence, 2017)





Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

verbs - "Baby is creeping" vs. "baby is crawling" in AmE

Years and years ago, I remember reading in a book on AmE usage that the phrasal turn a baby creeps before it walks was to some extent more common to AmE than to BrE, which preferred exclusively the "crawl" version. And so, I just recently checked on the accuracy of that information on NGram Viewer , and it actually was fact... more than a century ago! What I would like you to tell is if it would sound sort of weird to hear someone say today in the US that a child "creeps" before walking and running (see Synonyms ) rather than it crawls. Also, what's the story to those terms? How did "to crawl" come to prevail and supersede "to creep" to describe the way a baby moves around? As with a plant, so with a child. His mind grows by natural stages. A child creeps before he walks , sits before he stands, cries before he laughs, babbles before he talks, draws a circle before he draws a square, lies before he tells the truth, and is selfish before he
Read more

commas - Does this sentence have too many subjunctives?

Does this sentence have too many subjunctives? If it please the king, let it be decreed that they be destroyed, and I will pay 10,000 talents of silver into the hands of those who have charge of the king's business, that they may put it into the king's treasuries. I am stumped by this sentence construction. First, there is "Let it be," which is a common English idiomatic phrase, but then it follows another subjunctive. Is that to say you can actually have a subjunctive followed by another subjunctive? Also, why does the sentence use "please"? If that's the subjunctive tense there, then why is it followed by another subjunctive instead of a conditional, or maybe "Let it be" is the conditional? Lastly, I wish to know how the that is used in the sentence. Perhaps, the simplified sentence can be restated like so: Let it be decreed that they be destroyed and that they may put it into the king's treasuries. If not, maybe the simplified sent
Read more

grammatical number - Use of lone apostrophe for plural?

I've been reading William Manchester's book "American Caesar", which is about Douglas MacArthur, and I found that he uses a strange convention for pluralizing the family name. When talking about the MacArthurs as a whole, he writes MacArthur' with an apostrophe, as in "After the war, the MacArthur' lived in Tokyo while the general was proconsul" (yes, he uses that term to describe him). I have never seen or heard of a rule that would prescribe this. Manchester is a bit old-timey in his style: for example, he also writes "in behalf of" instead of "on behalf of", which is the only one I have ever seen. So perhaps this is similar. Where does he get this apostrophe from? Edit: There seems to be some difficulty finding examples, which is odd. Here is a direct link to a page from Google Books that shows the apostrophe.
Read more

etymology - Where does the phrase "doctored" originate?

This is a phrase I’m particularly confused about, because it’s used often when something is manipulated or changed. For example, sometimes images surface online that are clearly Photoshopped, but people refer to them as “doctored” images. Why use the word “doctored” here? Answer The earliest Google Books match for an instance of doctored in a transitional (or perhaps post-transitional) sense between "amended" and "adulterated" appears in William Marshall, The Rural Economy of Glocestershire; Including Its Dairy: Together with the Dairy Management of North Wiltshire, and the Management of Orchards and Fruit Liquor, in Herefordshire , volume 2 (1789): Men in general, however, whose palates are set to rough cider, consider the common sweet sort as an effeminate beverage; and rough cider, properly manufactured, is probably the most generous liquor; being deemed more wholesome, to habits in general, than sweet cider:—even when genuine. That which is drank, in the kingd
Read more

phrases - Somebody is gonna kiss the donkey

I heard this phrase when I was watching Battleship. An old man said, "Somebody is gonna kiss the donkey." I do not know what it means, I only heard it in a movie. What is this phrase mean? In Addition: I think it was Rihanna who said "Saddle Ridge will be in weapons range in five minutes," then the old man stated the phrase. Answer It is a confused attempt at a play on (for example) "kiss my ass," or, some similar phrase. It is quite common in English today that idioms get mangled.
Read more

typography - When a dagger is used to indicate a note, must it come after an asterisk?

The typographical symbol dagger (†) has several meanings. Possibly its most common use is as a footnote marker. According to You Have a Point There: A Guide to Punctuation and Its Allies ( Partridge , 1953), when it is used for this purpose, it must be used for second footnotes only; the first footnote should be indicated by an asterisk (*), the third a double dagger (‡) and further footnotes other symbols or numbers. Where does Patridge's rule fall on a scale of one to ten, where one is "this is just one guy's random opinion" and ten is "this is a widely accepted rule of English and any deviation from it is unarguably incorrect"? This question was inspired by this Meta Stack Overflow question about the use of daggers on Stack Exchange site FAQ pages . Answer The dagger (also known as an obelisk ) is properly used for the second footnote. The asterisk is for the first, and the double dagger is for the third. This is supported by several websites: And so
Read more

etymology - Origin of "s--t eating grin"

What is the origin of the phrase shit eating grin ? How did it come to mean showing smugness or self-satisfaction of an individual's actions? Answer From the Urban Dictionary: ...these uses are documented in the Oxford English Dictionary no earlier than 1957 There have been similar expressions used quite far back: In Book XXI of his History of Rome, Livy describes a Carthaginian sect of coprophages, the risus faecivorus, or shit-eating grin, being commonly displayed by its adherents. Although, its origin is undetermined, they may have been incidents which caused the invention of this phrase. Below is an excerpt: "1944 Jrnl. Nerv. & Mental Dis. XCIX. 959 Among demented patients in advanced stages of their illness,..it is not rare to see some of them grasp their own feces, chew them and eat them often with great pleasure and satisfaction (coprophagia).
Read more