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

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

#101

Post by hasenj » Wed, Jan 12, 2011, 2:02 PM UTC

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…

At around 1993 we used cassette tapes to save progress in the game "The Castle"[0] on MSX[1]

Actually I was too young to know what was going on; my dad setup the tape thing.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Castle_%28game%29

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX

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

#102

Post by brudgers » Wed, Jan 12, 2011, 2:06 PM UTC

jedsmith wrote: post #88

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.

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

Seeing as Windows has been bootable from removable drives and over networks for a long time, I sincerely doubt it.

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

#103

Post by stuhacking » Wed, Jan 12, 2011, 2:06 PM UTC

bhavin wrote: post #17

One 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

Perhaps it's because the first IBM PC did not have an internal hard disk as standard?

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

#104

Post by zandorg » Wed, Jan 12, 2011, 2:08 PM UTC

jefffoster wrote: post #18

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?

My first stab at being an entrepreneur was buying normal 3.5" disks, stamping holes in them and selling them as pristine 3.5" HD disks. Let's just say it was less successful than I'd hoped.

I did this on an Acorn Archimedes disk and though okay at first, the floppy got corrupted after a few days. Bad idea!

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

#105

Post by pwelch » Wed, Jan 12, 2011, 2:08 PM UTC

benwerd wrote: post #27

Aw, 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.

http://abstrusegoose.com/323

The last line: "COBOL is forever" gets me every time. =)

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

#106

Post by rbanffy » Wed, Jan 12, 2011, 2:09 PM UTC

electromagnetic wrote: post #65

rbanffy wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I haven't actually put a floppy in there in years I have one computer (a Sun workstation) with a 3.5 drive that no longer works. The fun part is I cannot tell you in what year it broke.

Mine broke when the eject failed, I used a paper clip to pull it out, but lost the paper clip. When it started smoking I had to pull the floppy's power - thankfully I had the side open to my computer so I didn't have to turn the whole thing off before I caused an actual fire. I think this was back in the early 2000's.

Here it just silently failed. I wanted to write something to a floppy and it just couldn't.

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

#107

Post by bergie » Wed, Jan 12, 2011, 2:11 PM UTC

Steve0 wrote: post #76

Makes you wonder, when will the floppy be discarded as the icon for 'save'?

GNOME has been using a picture of a hard drive for quite a while now: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gnome-document-save.s...

Though that may also become antiquated with SSDs and cloud storage :-)

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

#108

Post by RodgerTheGreat » Wed, Jan 12, 2011, 2:11 PM UTC

redthrowaway wrote: post #33

maxklein wrote: post #32

In 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.

Physical limits are a major component of latency. Until we figure out a way to transmit information instantly with infinite bandwidth, local storage will always be a significant factor.

edit: And given trends in solid-state drives, local storage will be cheaper and more energy efficient than a wireless network for a long time.

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

#109

Post by rbanffy » Wed, Jan 12, 2011, 2:12 PM UTC

seabee wrote: post #97

trezor wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Don't forget the ASSIGN utility which created new device roots from one (or more!) existing folders, or with deferrment i.e. when assigning Fonts: to df0:Fonts, the OS remembers the disk referred to, and will ask you for that specific disk if you remove it and subsequently access Fonts:. It made working with floppies a lot more pleasant. SUBST on Windows is similar, but with 1/10th of the power and just single drive…

I think it was overcome by PCs when they started offering VGA graphics. The Amiga architecture was much more "intimate" with video generation than PCs and, thus, were not so easy upgrade as newer hardware became available.

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

#110

Post by jeza » Wed, Jan 12, 2011, 2:13 PM UTC

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?

By the time AOL launched in this country, they were giving away CDs which weren't good for anything but drink coasters. It seems they've long since departed as well.