I don't know if they're on HN yet, but there's a generation for which "writing to disk" has nothing to do with disks of anything.

Depends on when you want to define "nothing to do with disk" as. M.2 was introduced in 2013 which would make them 9 years old by now, but if we look at Samsung's 2006 PATA SSD (with 32GiB!), then they'd be 17 and could well be on here.

Yeah I suppose there's a lot of wiggle room there. Personally I associate disks with circles because:

> In geometry, a disk (also spelled disc) is the region in a plane bounded by a circle. (wikipedia)

So you wouldn't find those in an SSD, it would have to be a spinning disk sort of deal.

I use a standard disk icon to represent "saving" in a popular web app I run. I very often see users referring to it with "click the square thing to save".

The “save” button is generally still a floppy disk as well!

I figure it's quite common for non native speaker, no ?

Semaphore basically means "traffic light" in many languages.

Even as a native speaker, I had been using the programming concept for a few years before I discovered the signaling doohickey.

I only knew about non-computer semaphores from the Swallows and Amazons books (which are from the 1930s and 1940s). If my mom hadn't read those books to me as a child, I don't know that I'd have come across the concept.

"Token ring" is something I learned in networking, and the Wikipedia article doesn't mention railroads at all. I assume that's where the term comes from, but I only heard about railway signalling tokens decades later. (I think they may have appeared in the Thomas the Tank Engine stories on Shining Time Station, but I was quite young at the time.)

I am a native English speaker and never heard the word "semaphore" until taking CS classes in college. I cannot think of a common use for the term, unlike flag (see them all the time), register (do that with cars and schools) or stack (lots of those in my kitchen).

> register (do that with cars and schools)

I would think computer register comes from the noun, not the verb — think cash register, not to register a car.

I agree, I was just trying to think of how the word "register" comes up in casual conversation.

I cannot think of a way that "semaphore" would come up in non-nerd conversation at all.

Or the covering of an air vent in a house.

Yea, like many computing terms are normal words now being used as jargon

I'm struggling to think of any computer terms that aren't repurposed 'normal' words, initialisms, acronyms, or portmanteaus. Even the words 'computer', 'program' and 'code' are repurposed.

"thunk"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunk

Ah but it says, "The term originated as a whimsical irregular form of the verb think." but without citation. Hmm, I dimly recall some hacker wag saying something like, "it's the sound of a continuation hitting the stack"...

Maybe "plonk" counts? https://en.everybodywiki.com/Plonk_(Usenet)

Foo?