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What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for?
41–50 of 149 posts
Re: What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for?
#42Re: What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for?
#43Senility poll: Did you know the answer to this question?
I did, made me feel old, and Im 25
Re: What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for?
#44I 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…
If I remember correctly, "PR#6" was basically just a command that executed the code at $c600. Each peripheral card had a 256-byte address space which was mapped into $cx00 where x was the slot number. Slot 6 was the standard slot for the disk controller -- it may even have been wired in, in later machines. So "PR#6" basically executed the firmware boot loader for the floppy drive.
Re: What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for?
#45It'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....
kerchunk!
brap brap brap eeee errrr eeeeeee errr brap brap aehhe aaaaeheh
insert disc 2/15
Re: What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for?
#46It'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....
OS2 came on 32 (thirty-two) 5.25" disks. I remember loading that beast.
Re: What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for?
#47That's pretty fun. I'm glad the highest voted reply on superuser wasn't snarky about the answer. This sort of reminds me of the "Who the hell is Paul McCartney?" thing on Twitter recently... which is an order of magnitude more irritating than a kid who never saw a floppy drive.
Re: What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for?
#48I had to go digging for a 3.5" drive a couple months back because I found some floppies that had some college papers on them. I have a zip disk with some artwork, too. At one point I had a SCSI zip drive and an Adaptec controller for it, but I have no idea where they're at now.
Adaptec 2940 FTW!
Re: What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for?
#49I 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…
If I remember correctly, "PR#6" was basically just a command that executed the code at $c600. Each peripheral card had a 256-byte address space which was mapped into $cx00 where x was the slot number. Slot 6 was the standard slot for the disk controller -- it may even have been wired in, in later machines. So "PR#6" basically executed the firmware boot loader for the floppy drive.
What I found weird was that I remembered the command, but not the technology it came from or exactly how I used it. So I'm Googling around trying to figure out when and why it was important. For some reason I remembered it as "Print #6".
Old age and forgetfulness is going to be really strange for a whole generation of computer nerds. So many different technologies, commands, and paradigms all jumbled up.
Re: What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for?
#50Also, even if you only had one physical floppy drive, it would still respond to A: and B:, albeit as split personalities. What I mean is that you could stick your programs disk in there and type A:EDITOR.EXE to run some editing program, and then go to save your document and type B:MYDOC.TXT as the filename, and DOS would know that you wanted to write this file to a different floppy, so it would day, "Insert disk for drive B and press enter", prompting you to swap the floppies. Then, when the editor program needed to access some of its files again, it would try to access, say, A:LIBRARY.OVL, and DOS would know that meant it was time to prompt the user to swap disks again.