Senility poll: Did you know the answer to this question?
Could also be that some people only used Macs or Linux or Unix or iPads.
What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for?
11–20 of 149 posts
Re: What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for?
#12A friend of my Father's was a mainframe guru, back in the day, and he told us about "cylinder" hard drives that would take several hours to power down because the torsional stress on them would get too high if slowed down too quickly. Also tape drives that were spinning so quickly they could be dangerous. Sounds almost like heavy engineering!
I remember the time someone thought they'd save money by buying cheap paper for the high speed IBM 6400 line printer. The print head moved so fast it just shredded the paper into a fine dust that caked in every internal part. It sucked cleaning that out.
Re: What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for?
#13The 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/.
Re: What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for?
#14OMG, i'm getting too old.
glad it's not just me
Re: What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for?
#15Re: What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for?
#16I 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.
Re: What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for?
#17It'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, but will put a thin slab block up to her ear. We don't have cable at home, so she watches all her shows on Netflix and iTunes.
Re: What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for?
#18OMG, i'm getting too old.
I think this was literally the first piece of "computer knowledge" I ever learned.
Re: What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for?
#19Senility poll: Did you know the answer to this question?
Could also be that some people only used Macs or Linux or Unix or iPads.
I hope that's a joke. In case it isn't: IBM PC predates all of those except UNIX (and you wouldn't think much of the pre-1980 UNIXen); CP/M, which originated the standard, comes from 1973.
Re: What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for?
#20We're not very far away from "what is the blue 'Save' icon meant to be?" are we?
Kind of amazing really. Girlfriend's nephews are 6 and 9, pretty tech savvy (there's a lot in the house), but they had no idea what the slots in the front of their grandfather's computer were (and why should they?!).