This makes me remember elementary school and saving stuff on floppies, and that i have Sango fighter on floppies in a drawer somewhere. They really do not make games as good as they were before!
The past ain't what it used to be.
For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?
31–40 of 280 posts
Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?
#32In 20 years people won't understand CDs either, or why people would carry around plastic as big as 3 iPods to play 12 songs.
Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?
#33In 20 years people won't understand CDs either, or why people would carry around plastic as big as 3 iPods to play 12 songs.
In 20 years, people won't understand iPods, or why you would have to physically carry around data anyway.
Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?
#34Aw, man. I turned 32 on Friday, which is 224 in developer years, and have spent the last couple of days consoling myself that everything's fine, I'm not past it, etc etc. And now this. Thank you, Hacker News. Thank you so much. I am as old as dust and time and the fabric of the universe. Now I know how all those COBOL programmers felt.
Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?
#35I must be a ancient, because I remember having to identify which side of the floppy I wanted to use!
On the BBC Micro, the first drive had sides 0 and 2; the second drive had sides 1 and 3. And I was lucky to have two drives. I only saw HDs on magazines.
Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
I started in computing with an Apple II+ (not really - my II+ was only the first to have floppies). I always wondered why those poor CP/M (and MSX) users had to put up with such nonsense as drive letters ;-)
I started out with an Amiga before moving to the PC. The Amiga (while still dealing with device-roots) at least had a more flexible system. fd0: was floppy 1. If you had an additional drive, that would be fd1: etc. The best part was that you could also access devices by file-system label, so if you needed to make sure you were accessing not only a floppy, but the device labelled "WorkbenchExtras" you would simply do…
I have to agree with you. Only now I got to play with an Amiga (a 500 became part of my collection) and it's really very sophisticated for the time it was released.
Just to imagine most today's PCs deal with cruft that dates back to the CP/M days is... disgusting.
Apple's ProDOS also had something like that - the volumes were named and you accessed files with /VOLUMENAME/FILE.DAT paths.
Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?
#37This question makes me feel old. And I'm in my early twenties.
One of my friends who teaches 11-16 year-olds recently had to explain to one of her classes what camera film was, and how it was used.
Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?
#38One might wonder why the first two letters are for floppy and not HDD. If you follow the drive letters, going from A to higher alphabets generally give you evolution of technology (ignoring network map Z:). A: - floppy C:/D: - HDD E: - CD/DVD F: - External Storage
Because MsDos, at least in its early versions, could not dynamically assign new drive letters to newly inserted disks. So the workaround, which is still with us years later in Windows 7, was to reserve at boot time the first two letters (A/B) for drives with removable media (i.e., floppy drives, there were no usb flash dongles in those days).
Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?
#39I finally threw away my Model II 8-inch floppies a few years ago.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Okona-GfhR-TRS-80.jpg
One day you'll have to take your kids to a museum to show them a CRT monitor (and they will have to take their kids to a museum to show them an incandescent light bulb).
Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?
#40Aw, man. I turned 32 on Friday, which is 224 in developer years, and have spent the last couple of days consoling myself that everything's fine, I'm not past it, etc etc. And now this. Thank you, Hacker News. Thank you so much. I am as old as dust and time and the fabric of the universe. Now I know how all those COBOL programmers felt.
If its any consolation I am only 24 and felt a bit old as well knowing entirely what was coming after clicking the link. Lets just say whoever posted the question is a newb :)
If its any consolation I am only 22 and felt a bit old as well knowing entirely what was coming after clicking the link.