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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?

#211

Post by terrym »

electromagnetic wrote: post #70
iwwr wrote: post #9

I remember a time when you needed to carry 30 floppies to be able to copy C&C:Red Alert... and it was worth it.

I just used the CD trick when playing multiplayer. You start the game with the disc in one computer and then eject and run into the next room to start the game on that computer. I think 9/10ths of the games I played with my brother were exploited with this trick until the warez scenes started developing proper and timely released nocd cracks.

Haha you just reminded me that we used to do this same trick for tribes 2 at a friend's house. We'd play online, too, so every time the map changed on the server, we'd have to run back and forth to load the new map.

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

#213

Post by ido »

yuhong wrote: post #206
jmaygarden wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does sound like an XT. The first PC I used was an XT-286; the precursor to the AT. It had a massive 20 MB hard drive! I still recall that the expensive accounting software for which my father purchased the computer required an ISA card to run it. Now that's anti-piracy!

"The first PC I used was an XT-286; the precursor to the AT." It was actually a smaller case version of the AT.

I believe it had a different cpu (6mhz vs 8mhz) and different a motherboard (16bit vs 8bit).

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

#214

Post by Semiapies »

mariani wrote: post #69
iwwr wrote: post #9

I remember a time when you needed to carry 30 floppies to be able to copy C&C:Red Alert... and it was worth it.

Same for when the demo of Quake came out, loved it.

I just spent two nights pulling that ~10MB down from a BBS.

10 fps 3D action!

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

#215

Post by zandorg »

waqf wrote: post #201
zandorg wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The Archimedes would format any floppy to any density, so you didn't need the hole punch.

My point was that formatting a 800kb disk to 1600kb (as you could on the Archimedes) is likely to - and in my experience has - corrupt after a few days of use, and thus is not worth the amount of money saved.

Luckily it was just copied games that got corrupted, but it could have been worse.

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

#217

Post by rbanffy »

camiller wrote: post #156
rbanffy wrote: post #12

Earlier 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 ;-)

IIRC on the Apple the floppies were normally S6D1 and S6D2 (if you had two), unless you installed your floppy controller card in a slot other than Slot 6, which was the norm.

That would be DOS 3.x. You could specify a file under (Apple's) DOS with "long_filename,S6,D1". File names could have up to 33 chars and had type information (one byte) so as not to rely on naming conventions.

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

#218

Post by Vivtek »

dstein wrote: post #202
Vivtek wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha! I took a Hungarian class with my daughter a couple of years ago; I think she was 8, which is why she needed me to sit in with her, given it was a college class at IU. (I should explain that her mother is Hungarian, and so this was more in the way of language practice and grammar instruction, not that my daughter is a super-genius. Although, of course, she is.) Anyway, one of the dialog exercises was to talk about…

For that matter it won't be long before children have no idea what a music CD is, if we're not there already.

My younger child is 11; he hasn't had much interaction with physical storage media for music.

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

#219

Post by kellishaver »

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…

We had a TI-99 with a tape drive-a standard tape player that you would set next to the Mic input on the computer, get the volume just right, and hit Play.

My dad and his friend used to send programs to each other late at night via HAM radio. One would hold the mic keyed next to the tape player playing back the ASCII and the other one would hold the speaker up to the computer's input and load the data.

This was in the early 80's. I think maybe they invented PACKET or something.

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

#220

Post by bigfudge »

trop wrote: post #196
NickPollard wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 recently had to explain to a class of college students what a LaserDisc was. It turned out, luckily, that one of the students also knew...

My god - that's a blast from the past. I actually credit the fact I ended up studying history to the 'Doomsday disc' the produced in the UK... would love to see a copy now. Do people still have the hardware knocking around?
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