They used to be used for floppy disks and other such things! In fact they started in DOS. Ah, remember the days? I do... b because I'm 27.
Anyone here started programming with QBasic?
For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?
131–140 of 280 posts
Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You've [luckily] never seen internally written software then. I see stuff referencing hardcoded paths to "C:\winnt\system32\" dlls all the time.
Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!
Still got mine, and a box of cartridges. Hacked the paddles into an some electronics experiment years ago, and the RF modulator's given up the ghost, but other than that still all good. Even still got the book, minus the back cover
Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?
#134This question makes me feel old. And I'm in my early twenties.
I'm not yet done high school , and it makes me feel old too.
Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?
#135Earlier 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 only ever had drives with write locks. I must have gotten into USB drives late because I've never heard of read lock.
Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?
#136Earlier 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
While not built into drives, an add-on hardware solution exists, Wiebetech's USB Writeblocker:
Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?
#137This 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.
I was in the same boat. My son found an old disposable camera in a drawer, and I couldn't find a decent way to explain it to him with out the WTF? look on his face.
Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?
#138Floppies!? Kids these days. My High School had an actual, physical computer, a Data General minicomputer. We used teletypes that printed on a continuous roll of cheap paper. The computer used removable media: 12" removable "Diablo" 5MB hard drive platters. One had four user basic on it, one had single user basic, and one was locked away with the software for grading students. Memory management was primitive: BASIC ra…
Luxury! I used to have to snip endless chads out of punched cards to represent the very zeroes and ones of the program i was writing! Thanks to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1a1wHxTyo
Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?
#139My 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
Vic20 here too. I think back like it was the golden years, but I vaguely recall some hanging during LOADING.
Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
That's pretty high end for an 8088! Is it a PC or PC-XT?
I'm betting XT. It sounds identical to what my father had.