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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?

#121

Post by csense »

When I bought a new computer in 2002, I specifically got one which still had a floppy drive, because I wanted to be sure I could play all my DOS games via boot disk [1].

DOSBox [2] was still in its infancy then, and the DOS emulation in Windows was...less than one hundred percent compatible with all the hardware tricks various DOS games used to squeeze the last ounce of performance out of the hardware. (In the DOS days, it was common practice for application programs, especially games, to directly deal with I/O ports, interrupts, DMA, etc.)

[1] A DOS boot disk is similar to a bootable Linux CD / DVD -- removable media containing an OS. In this case, you mainly use it to customize the loaded drivers on a per-game basis. Regardless of how much physical memory you have, in DOS only 640K is conveniently addressable [3], so it's very important to selectively load only the drivers a specific game needs.

[2] http://www.classicdosgames.com/interviews/peterveenstra.html

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conventional_memory

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

#122

Post by diminoten »

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…

She's 1, and has "her shows"? That's awesome. Kids these days!

I'm 24 and I remember having my parent's 30-floppy install of Word Perfect, I just never had to use it. They had a Windows 3.1 computer when I was 6 or 7 and I used it, but frankly it was so hard to do anything with I didn't find myself interested in computers until after Windows 95 had come out.

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

#123

Post by wayne_h »

acegopher wrote: post #85
microtonal wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even worse was illegal software. There were 720KB (Double Density) and 1440KB (High Density) 3.5" diskettes (amongst other sizes). The disk drive would detect the difference by an extra hole in the disk. People would buy cheaper double density disks, drill a hole in it, so that the same diskette could be used as a 1440KB disk. Of course, they were of a far lower quality, and 'arj' (which was popular at the time) woul…

I used an Xacto knife to create an extra notch in Commodore 64 5.25" disks back in the day so that I could take the single-sided disks and make them double-sided. I would take one disk flipped over the other, mark the notch with a permanent marker, then cut out the outline. Most disks, like Elephant Memory, would work fine. You just flipped the disk over and inserted back into the 1541 to read the reverse side.

"... flipped the disk over..."

They called them flippy disks...

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

#124

Post by [deleted] »

dpratt wrote: post #80
IgorPartola wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am only 27! Why is this happening?!

Just wait - in another two or three years, you will suddenly not be able to be trusted with meaningful architectural decisions, you will be looked down upon as too slow, and your years of knowledge will be ignored because clearly you don't have anything to offer.

[deleted]

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

#125

Post by mtdewcmu »

EldieTurner wrote: post #73
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…

I remember installing Borland C++ with stacks of floppies, it felt like 50 but probably more like 30 or so. It took half a day.

But when you got it installed, finally, you felt like you earned it.

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

#127

Post by ghostDancer »

ck2 wrote: post #46
einhverfr wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Windows 1.0 was a little bit less : http://twitpic.com/39kbjz but you need to install first DOS: http://twitpic.com/39kaxd

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

#128

Post by gutsy »

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?

Yea, pretty much. That's why you had backups of any important software (copying floppies was a really fun process). Once the disk died, you were screwed if you didn't have a backup copy of it.

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

#129

Post by gutsy »

EldieTurner wrote: post #73
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…

I remember installing Borland C++ with stacks of floppies, it felt like 50 but probably more like 30 or so. It took half a day.

Oh man, yea...I never installed anything with THAT many disks...I think the biggest one was 7 or 8 floppies...which took several hours.

I kinda miss those days. Sometimes.

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

#130

Post by DanBC »

martin-adams wrote: post #69
unistdh wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's why you had a backup set of those disks.

Many of the MS disks used weird methods and formats, making copying the discs not easy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_Media_Format

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