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What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for?

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Re: What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for?

#31

Post by DanielBMarkham »

I now officially christen this the "old guy thread of the day".

Back in my day, kid, we didn't have no stinking floppies for our PCs. All we had was cassette recorders, and we were happy to have 'em!

Reading this question took me down memory lane to doing a lot of PR#6. Couldn't remember if that command was for floppies or cassettes. Had to look it up. It was how we did I/O on the Apple II. As I remember, you changed the number (PR#3, PR#4, etc) based on the physical slot the peripheral was plugged into. This was back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and real men wore skirts.

Re: What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for?

#32

Post by amerika_blog »

If I could, I'd start everyone off "learning" about computers by using an Apple ][+. It is an open enough environment to learn just about everything, and a restricted enough environment to encourage efficiency and elegant design. After that, kick 'em upstairs to something modern with a Lisp compiler and you've got 'em for life.

Re: What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for?

#33

Post by einhverfr »

etfb wrote: post #5
return0 wrote: post #3

OMG, i'm getting too old.

I came here to say that. In fact, bugger it, I don't care about originality! I'm going to say it too! Oh gods, I'm so old.

You know when I saw punchcards first, they were already a somewhat bygone relic of ages past. But I used floppy disks for a long time. That someone would ask this question today, never having seen a computer with a floppy disk... Yeah I feel old....

Re: What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for?

#35

Post by mtrimpe »

networked wrote: post #13

The drive letter B: is also used by BartPE [1] as the default for its RAM disk. In fact, I think every time but one I encountered a Windows-era PC that had a B: drive it was a RAM disk, not a floppy drive. [1] A bootable live Windows XP/Server 2003 environment. See http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/ .

A: and B: were more relevant when PCs didn't have hard drives. Back then usually the OS would be on A and your current game/app would be on B.

I still remember the first game that was soooo big it required both A and B, meaning you to take the OS boot disk out (which you of course always forgot to put back in after you were done.)

Good thing I had a dad who soldered Philips' Apple ][ clone together when I was 2 so that I don't feel that old for knowing this ;)

Re: What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for?

#37

Post by einhverfr »

rayiner wrote: post #17

It's funny to talk about the 20 year old hackers who didn't ever have the experience of installing Word Perfect 5.x from 30-40 floppies, but let me tell you that those kids are going to feel just as old pretty soon. My daughter, who is about to turn one, is puzzled by why my Macbook Air doesn't do anything when she touches the screen. She doesn't recognize my dad's old Treo, which he gave her as a toy, as a phone, bu…

Dude, my copy of SCO Unix was only maybe 15 floppies....
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