Posted by IndySun 5 hours ago
My late father never quite got out of the habit of calling it the "Winchester" - itself a nickname for a specific IBM drive model.
They used to be separate, so you would mount the hard disk on the drive to make it accessible.
Of course now everything tends to be solid state even terms like "drive" are becoming less common.
"Disc" comes from "discus" (the plate thrown in the Olympics)
"Disk" comes from "diskette" (French for "small disc")
I probably just outed myself as a boomer assuming that was common knowledge.
In French we say disque for both. it's pronounced the same as disk and disc.
The fact of the matter is that the spelling "disk" probably entered common use from IBM who invented both the hard and the floppy disk, calling the latter the Type 1 Diskette. Enough people were exposed to the "disk" spelling from IBM usage that it kind of stuck, although in the early 1980s the spelling "floppy disc" was sometimes encountered.