For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used? • Hacker News Board

Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?

#81

Post by sbt » Wed, Jan 12, 2011, 1:18 PM UTC

Now I just feel old

Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?

#82

Post by madaxe » Wed, Jan 12, 2011, 1:18 PM UTC

ja27 wrote: post #59

redthrowaway wrote: post #11

Who 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?

Yeah, and they worked really well.

Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?

#83

Post by madaxe » Wed, Jan 12, 2011, 1:20 PM UTC

michael_dorfman wrote: post #80

I recently bought my 13-year-old daughter a laptop with 8 gig of RAM. When I was 13, I was lucky enough to get a computer with 8 kb of RAM (and one of the 8 went to the operating system, so there were 7167 bytes free.) There aren't too many areas where one generation translates to a million-fold improvement.

Your daughter had better be using that 8 gig for something useful. 8k should be enough for anybody!

Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?

#84

Post by bane » Wed, Jan 12, 2011, 1:21 PM UTC

"Once upon a time ... technologies of the past." "Il était une fois... les technologies du passé."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdSHeKfZG7c

This video made me feel tremendously old.

Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?

#85

Post by bnastic » Wed, Jan 12, 2011, 1:22 PM UTC

SSD is the best upgrade we can do these days?

Kids don't know what it feels to upgrade from a C-64 with a "datasette" to an early Atari 520ST with 3.5" floppies. THAT was an upgrade, everything else pales in comparison.

Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?

#86

Post by ikitat » Wed, Jan 12, 2011, 1:25 PM UTC

ghostDancer wrote: post #74

RyanMcGreal wrote: post #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 mega bytes? Between that and my custom AUTOEXEC.BAT file, I was set. As it happens, I still have most of the files I cr…

Well windows 1.0 were only [1] 5 5.25" floppies and [2] 2 for MS-DOS and another one for write (the grandfather of word). I think i need a drive to try them again ;-) . [1] http://twitpic.com/39kbjz [2] http://twitpic.com/39kaxd

I recall Slackware Linux requiring 13 disks

Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?

#87

Post by anon_for_this_1 » Wed, Jan 12, 2011, 1:30 PM UTC

cubicle67 wrote: post #79

RiderOfGiraffes wrote: post #52

My 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…

A few years ago I went back to school for a bit. One day I was sitting with my classmates, average age about 18, discussing our first computers. I mentioned I got started on a Vic 20 with a tape drive. Suggested someone, "Was that so you could listen to music while you coded?". Took some effort to convince them I wasn't pulling their leg when I told them that it was used to save programmes to

Ahh the Vic 20. Warms my heart just hearing about it :) My parents bribed me to do some stuff when I was younger with the reward of a floppy disk drive. I was living like a boss when I got that drive!

Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?

#88

Post by jedsmith » Wed, Jan 12, 2011, 1:30 PM UTC

erikstarck wrote: post #15

Quite fascinating how some design decisions tend to stick due to technical or other reasons. We will probably still run Windows 2020 on the C-drive. Sometimes the reason is backwards compatiblity, other times it's something that requires a huge redesign of an entire system. But, most of the time I think it's because people simply think that this is the way things are supposed to be. One example is how long it took be…

A massive pile of legacy Windows stuff probably assumes C: is the boot volume.

Windows has always had extensive backward compatibility, even if it requires tweaking to run 9x programs on XP and up. I often wonder how much better Windows could be if Microsoft were to choose to repeat OS X's innovation, which was almost completely severing backward compatibility.

Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?

#89

Post by el_chapitan » Wed, Jan 12, 2011, 1:41 PM UTC

This makes me remember when the first iMac came out (apparently in '98) and just broke my brain by not having a floppy drive.

http://www.businessweek.com/1998/36/b3594050.htm

Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?

#90

Post by motters » Wed, Jan 12, 2011, 1:45 PM UTC

As far as I remember the A and B drives were used for floppy disks. In the olden days home computers didn't have hard drives, and typically either had a single or dual floppy drive. With a dual drive you could do fancy things like make backup copies, without having to repeatedly store data to RAM and swap source and destination floppies. In the 1980s home computers typically didn't have enough memory to store the entire contents of a floppy disk in RAM, which made the process of creating backups irksome if you didn't have a dual drive.

If you've only started using Windows based computers within the last five years then the missing A and B drives may seem mysterious. Floppy drives started disappearing from first laptops and then desktop machines in the early 2000s.