Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

superuser.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 280 posts

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

#231

Post by rbanffy »

camiller wrote: post #223
rbanffy wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

No. Apple DOS filenames were limited to 30 chars. ProDOS was limited at 15 chars.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_DOS

My 33 figure was wrong (either me or Wikipedia). Maybe the directory entry had 33 bytes (30 for the file name, 1 for type, and two for track and sector)

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

#234

Post by trop »

bigfudge wrote: post #220
trop wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The student who knew grew up in a household full of 'em. Videophiles find advantages in LaserDiscs over DVD: http://www.starlaser.com/dvd-lasr.htm and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laserdisc#Comparison_with_DVD. Jacket art and possible increased quality due to uncompressed video are cited. I didn't know LaserDisc was an analog format! LaserDisc has some of the grooviness of the 8-track, if not the deep catalog of the LP.

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

#235

Post by Lazlo_Nibble »

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…

We had a PDP-11/34a running RSTS/E v7.0-07. About 50/50 split between VT100s and printing terminals, plus one Tektronix and later on a few GiGis; storage was two washing machine-size RK07 drives (swappable 28Mb dual-platter cartridges the size of a small trashcan lid) and two RX02 8" floppy drives. We found some undocumented escape codes for the VT100s that let you play "music" on the keyboard by turning on keyclick and cranking up the autorepeat on insane levels. Someone bought DUNGEO (the original version of Zork) from DECUS too. Man that was fun.

I still have all my 8" floppies -- loads of BASIC programs, and a lot of content from the message-board system we wrote for it. You could enter posts using VT100 escape sequences to create animations. I figure there's a 50/50 chance the disks are still readable, since the bits are the size of small cats -- someday I'll find someone who can dump them for me.

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

#236

Post by extension »

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…

Goes to show how much we've come to embrace change in the last couple of decades. Software was coming on ~50 floppies before we ditched them for CDs. Nowadays, things never get that bad before a replacement is phased in.

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

#237

Post by billybob »

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.

Man, I didn't even START programming until I was 27, and my career is going great. You aren't old until you stop learning.

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

#238

Post by waqf »

RodgerTheGreat wrote: post #227
waqf wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Firstly, that number is a function of how far apart your particular origin and destination are, so it's not intrinsic to the station wagon.

And secondly, you just measured latency there, not bandwidth.

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

#239

Post by [deleted] »

drndown2007 wrote: post #128
RiderOfGiraffes wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TRS-80 Model I: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80

I loved the TRS-80. We had some in my Jr High. We had an assignment to create some large ASCII art via hundreds of print statements and then print it out on the dot matrix printer.

[deleted]

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

#240

Post by redthrowaway »

RodgerTheGreat wrote: post #108
redthrowaway wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>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.

At some point, though, you get diminishing returns. If all you're doing is playing mp3s at 192 kbit/s, existing wireless is fine and future wireless will be more than adequate. There's no need to add the expense of putting local storage on a mobile device if you can achieve the same end cheaper with cloud hosting.

Now, this is all academic, as we're talking about a radio, and I don't think they're likely to be around by then. Whether or not a device includes local storage will be an economic decision given its intended usage and market conditions of the time, which nobody can predict with great certainty.

Post reply on HN