I remember having an Amstrad 640k. Two 5 1/4 floppy drives, no hard disk. Booting it up involved putting in about 5 disks one after the other and took about 20 minutes. Ah those were the days.
5 disks? What were you running?
For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?
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Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?
#52My first computer didn't have disk drives at all - it used standard audio cassette tapes in standard audio cassette machines. I remember feeding the audio into an oscilliscope and reverse engineering the format used on the tape, then writing Z80 machine code (I didn't have an assember - I wrote actual hex opcodes and fed them into a program I wrote that read hex and poked the values into memory) to create tapes that then overwrote the stack and booted me into a machine code monitor.
Then I wrote a Forth operating system.
This was on a 16KB machine (I had the expansion pack) with a 1.7MHz Z80.
Fun days. I still have the machine and its complete circuit diagram. I should get it out again, but then again, I don't have time:
Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?
#53Who else remembers using the square punch to put a hole in those 3 1/2" AOL disks to reformat them as HD?
Square hole punches cost money. Scissors are already lying around the house. Sure, the results weren't pretty, but then pretty was not the stated goal. This was for 5 1/4" floppies, naturally. By the time 3 1/2" was the standard, I had a job and could simply requisition them as needed.
I remember getting a few funny looks from the stores in the Electrical Engineering department when I requisitioned a few (probably at least five) boxes of 3 1/2" floppies so I could install Linux (Slackware) complete with a pretty full X11 environment (I'm pretty sure X and its apps was split over at least 12 floppies).
This would have been late '93 or so.
Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?
#54Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?
#55Also a nice reminder to expect the unexpected in your work. I bet most programs back then trusted there was a disk in A. Now installers are relying on the existence of C. But what if you boot from USB? The '/' solution is a more elegant one in this case.
Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?
#56This question makes me feel old. And I'm in my early twenties.
Same here and I'm not much older than you. Worse, my current computer has an A:\ drive. I don't know why I keep a 3.5" floppy drive around, exactly, because I haven't actually put a floppy in there in years, but I do have one. And that's nothing compared to the 8088 that's collecting dust. It has two floppy drives, a 10 MB (yes, MB, not GB) hard drive, a CGA card & monitor, a math coprocessor and as much RAM as it ca…
I'm in my early twenties, and this makes me feel old too. I have an 8088 too (which contains both an A and a B drive), I should fire it up again. Though mine has a Hercules graphics adaptor (everything is green!)
hums the california games chiptune
Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep, or vice versa, put a bit of tape over the hole to make disks writable that weren't intended to be. Good times!
USB drives could use such a feature. write-lock : prevent it from beint written (and acquiring viruses) read-lock : prevent it from being read (and passing viruses), only showing the free space and being able to write only in the free space
I have several USB drives with at least the former feature.
Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
In 20 years, people won't understand iPods, or why you would have to physically carry around data anyway.
How would they play music when jogging or in the train then?
I live in Australia and already try to live mostly in the cloud. I have more than enough mobile data transferring > 5Mbps anywhere that I happen to be to live completely on cloud-based technologies if such technologies existed for all my requirements.
Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?
#59Who else remembers using the square punch to put a hole in those 3 1/2" AOL disks to reformat them as HD?
Remember punching single-sided 5 1/4" disks to make them double-sided?
Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?
#60> "Please Insert Disk 13" OH GOD WHERE IS DISK 13, I CAN'T FIND DISK 13. - Jeff 16 hours ago
I have exactly this memory as well.
My first computer was a Compaq Deskpro Portable. It had a 5.25" floppy drive and a 40 MB hard disk. It was an embarrassment of riches - how could you ever fill up 40 whole megabytes? Between that and my custom AUTOEXEC.BAT file, I was set.
As it happens, I still have most of the files I created on that original computer, and can even run my old BASIC programs using DOSBox on Ubuntu. I had to copy the files via 5.25" floppies to another computer that had a 5.25" and a 3.5" floppy drive; and from there on 3.5" floppies to yet another computer that had a 3.5" floppy drive and a CD drive.