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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?

#221

Post by cadr »

runjake wrote: post #168

The Timex-Sinclair 1000 was like my 3rd or 4th computer. End of contest (hopefully all the real PDP folks are long dead, right?). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Sinclair_1000 2K RAM, 3 MHZ CPU (much faster than the .9 MHZ of my TRS-80 Color Computer. Yes, it didn't even have 1 MHZ). And yes, I did a lot of programming on that keyboard.

A VAX 11/750 was my 4th or so computer.

Of course, that was after an Apple II clone, and C64, and a 286. They were scrapping it and I (my high school, but really me) ended up with it. Can't remember if I ever got it working properly, but it was really impressive. It had been used in an NMR setup and had really neat vacuum tubes to do connect to that.

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

#222

Post by juiceandjuice »

_b8r0 wrote: post #180
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…

Why the oscilliscope? No SAVE command? Why did you need to overwrite the stack?

Analog oscilloscopes have a save feature, it's called a camera hooked up to the trigger output.

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

#223

Post by camiller »

rbanffy wrote: post #217
camiller wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Long file names were under Apple ProDOS Apple DOS was still 8.3 (I think).

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

#224

Post by Natsu »

ido wrote: post #45
Natsu wrote: post #28

Earlier 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 think it's PC-XT. I added a lot of those parts with bits I found in a Hamfest back in the 90s. It's been mothballed for ages because I have nowhere to put it so I've honestly forgotten.

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

#225

Post by mseebach »

NickPollard wrote: post #37
giu wrote: post #4

This 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.

One of my nieces was photographed by her grandmother with a film camera, and immediately ran to her, expecting to see the picture on the back of the camera. On learning that wasn't possible, she exclaimed "oh, it's not working".

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

#226

Post by kschua »

raganwald wrote: post #116

Floppies!? 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…

I was really surprised to see this question asked. I had always assume it was a given that people knew that A: and B: were for floppies.

Just brings back memories of the days when I had one floppy drive. I had to load MS-DOS disk, then swap to my game disk.

Then when I had two floppy drives, I was jumping for joy. Now I don't need to swap disk.

The pain of installing MS Office 4.3 with a dozen floppy.

Ah ... the memories

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

#227

Post by RodgerTheGreat »

waqf wrote: post #203
regularfry wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relevant: "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes."

That quote has always bugged me. It's dimensionally wrong: a station wagon doesn't have bandwidth. Bandwidth (in the sense intended here) is measured in bits/second: how do you measure that from a station wagon [full of mag tapes]? Now a freeway full of station wagons ... that has bandwidth.

If it takes an hour to copy a terabyte of data to a tape, put it in a car, drive to a location and read the tape, you just transported 8796093022208 bits in 3600 seconds, or about 2443359173 bits/second.

edit: I always understood the quote as "the [potential] bandwidth"- the bandwidth that can be available using the station wagon as physical infrastructure.

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

#228

Post by nitrogen »

jarek wrote: post #117
iwwr wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

SD cards have a write-lock. It always amazes me that it's purely physical and only a suggestion to the software.

On some SD cards in some SD readers, the write-lock switch is too small to trigger the mechanical switch in the reader, making the card appear as read-only until tape is applied over the switch. This problem affects my BeagleBoard's OS SD card.

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

#229

Post by iwh »

NickPollard wrote: post #37
giu wrote: post #4

This 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.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2097732

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

#230

Post by russell »

Vivtek wrote: post #165
jdee wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You had cards? We had to use a hammer and awl to punch the holes into vellum that we tanned ourselves.

You think you're joking. I remember having to use a $5000 box of real fan fold vellum to print a short document as specified by some govt contract or other.
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