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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?

#51

Post by 300bps »

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…

Novell Netware 2.15 came on 49 360k floppies. I remember generating individualized network clients based on the chipset of your network interface card with SHGEN-1 and SHGEN-2. To this day I have no idea why the last disk it asked for was SHGEN-2 and then it said, "Your shell is now on SHGEN-1."

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

#55

Post by einhverfr »

chadillac83 wrote: post #45
einhverfr wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 http://i.imgur.com/aIv6Y90.jpg

The really annoying thing about SCO Unix is that it didn't use BIOS so trying to install it on a system with an unsupported floppy disk drive controller would invariably have it unable to find the floppy disk after booting the first one, and if the video card was not supported, the screen would just go black after booting off the first disk.

Oh those were the days.

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

#56

Post by unistdh »

300bps wrote: post #51
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…

Novell Netware 2.15 came on 49 360k floppies. I remember generating individualized network clients based on the chipset of your network interface card with SHGEN-1 and SHGEN-2. To this day I have no idea why the last disk it asked for was SHGEN-2 and then it said, "Your shell is now on SHGEN-1."

Wow. What would happen if one of those floppies were damaged or unreadable? Would the whole process be a waste of time?

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

#57

Post by pjmlp »

carloc wrote: post #6

Senility poll: Did you know the answer to this question?

Yes. I am old enough to have seen DIY 8bit computer kits on hardware stores.

My first computer was a Timex 2068, using a tape recorder with counter!

The dream of every kid was to have a double deck tape recorder.

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

#58

Post by chrissmeuk »

How quaint.

I still use floppy disks. I have a synthesizer (korg triton studio) which uses them for backups from its internal hard disk. I never managed to get sysex to work properly with my MIDI adapter so floppy disks are actually pretty convenient for backing up songs and patches to my PC for later archiving.

In the new year, it will be replaced with a CF reader and IDE/SCSI bridge (as I have most of the bits lying around) though as it's more convenient and the internal disk is 11 years old which scares me.

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

#60

Post by chrissmeuk »

unistdh wrote: post #56
300bps wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Novell Netware 2.15 came on 49 360k floppies. I remember generating individualized network clients based on the chipset of your network interface card with SHGEN-1 and SHGEN-2. To this day I have no idea why the last disk it asked for was SHGEN-2 and then it said, "Your shell is now on SHGEN-1."

Wow. What would happen if one of those floppies were damaged or unreadable? Would the whole process be a waste of time?

Yes entirely. This frequently happened.

For me, I managed to stuff up a debian disk resulting in a reinstall on my PC failing. I didn't have enough disk space to dual boot. I had to walk to a friend's house 3 miles away and redownload it over a 28.8k dialup, then walk home and start again.

I did a windows NT install from floppy once and that was even more tetchy.

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