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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?

#141

Post by gabemart »

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'm only in my mid 20s and I already feel totally left behind by the rise of mobile computing. Every experience I've had of the web on a mobile device has been incredibly frustrating. The idea of a phone or tablet as one's primary computing device makes me feel about 90 years old.

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

#142

Post by rayiner »

dwaltrip wrote: post #107
judk wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sad that a 1 year old has "all her shows" to watch.

[Non-valuable contribution, removed] Edit: I apologize for the rudeness of my comment. However, it is my understanding that the evidence available today points to things like TV being damaging to the development of the very young (1-3 years old)

My wife and I practice evidence based parenting. We do whatever is most convenient for us unless we can find substantial evidence indicating we should do something else. That's a challenge when it comes to parenting, because parenting is driven by hysterics, group think, and paranoia more than anything else.

When it comes to television, studies have shown some negative correlation. But they disappear when you adjust for socioeconomic status and parental education: http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/03/03/babies.watch.TV.

What the data really indicates is that poor people and single parents let their kids watch more TV, and since IQ is highly heritable, TV watching ends up being linked to lower cognitive performance. But it doesn't seem to be a causal relationship, or at least the data doesn't clearly support that conclusion.

Obviously its important to engage with kids, and parking them in front of an iPad could get in the way of that. But at the end of the day, there are no prizes for making parenting harder than it already is.

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

#143

Post by nasalgoat »

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.

I had a special square cutter tool specifically designed for this purpose. Just slot the disk in the tool, punch, done.

It helped when you were putting out hundreds of disks of pirated games on a regular basis.

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

#144

Post by millerm »

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…

Humorous image of thousands of floppies if you were to install windows 8.1 with that media: http://i.imgur.com/g0Zgf6q.jpg

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

#146

Post by etfb »

einhverfr wrote: post #33
etfb wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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....

You want to know old? I'll tell you old. I just downloaded a copy (never mind where from) of Borland Pascal 7.0, the last version of Turbo Pascal for MSDOS. I have my own legal copy, with 5¼" disks, but no disk drives. But I also have a program I wrote in the mid-1980s that still has some users, and I've wondered for a long time what would happen if I needed to make changes to it. Now, thanks to DOSbox, I can run that entire programming environment on my Linux box and... probably do nothing with it, but at least it's there...

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

#147

Post by einhverfr »

etfb wrote: post #146
einhverfr wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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....

You want to know old? I'll tell you old. I just downloaded a copy (never mind where from) of Borland Pascal 7.0, the last version of Turbo Pascal for MSDOS. I have my own legal copy, with 5¼" disks, but no disk drives. But I also have a program I wrote in the mid-1980s that still has some users, and I've wondered for a long time what would happen if I needed to make changes to it. Now, thanks to DOSbox, I can run tha…

I have downloaded C64 software I have legally to run on Frodo.....

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

#148

Post by danellis »

raldi wrote: post #50

Also, 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…

At that time (okay, a little later, but there was some overlap), I was using RISC OS. Its disk format allowed for each disk to have a name, which would be used in fully qualified filenames (e.g. ADFS::MyData.$.Docs.Resume). The OS could then ask for the disk by name (MyData).
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