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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?

#131

Post by gutsy »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #31

I 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…

See, my first computer was a Tandy 1000 and it just ran off of floppies and RAM. No hard drive. My mind was blown when we upgraded to a Windows 3.1 system that not only had a hard drive, but also a 3.5" floppy drive. WHOA, SMALLER DISKS.

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

#133

Post by gutsy »

Zirro wrote: post #21
carloc wrote: post #6

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

Partially. I am old enough to remember computers with one floppy drive (for old software, explaining the A:-position), but too young to have experienced the times when you needed two.

You never NEEDED two. All two did was make it easier to copy disks, and sometimes make it so you changed disks less often.

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

#134

Post by mtdewcmu »

microtonal wrote: post #70
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?

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…

Later on in the 90s, AOL started sending 3.5" disks in the mail, totally free. How convenient was that?

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

#135

Post by subb »

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…

My uncle told me that two of its nephews play "phone" together by putting their whole hand flat against their ear instead of the usual thumb/pinky finger gesture...

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

#136

Post by DanBC »

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)

As with all parenting topics this one is a bit more complicated.

There's not much science. That science is poorly reported by mass media. It's misunderstood by many readers. And most people have fierce cognitive biases anyway.

(http://blogs.wsj.com/juggle/2011/10/19/no-tv-for-tots-doctor...)

Basically, "talk to your children. watching tv stops you talking to your children". I guess that's reasonable, except you can't talk constantly at children. Not everything is a learning opportunity. The parents and the children need some down time. The science doesn't say anything about exhausted stressed parents deprived of human contact and the impact that has on children, or the possible benefits of TV to that parent.

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

#137

Post by endgame »

networked wrote: post #13

The 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/ .

Bart's work is fantastic. I just submitted his MODBOOT page, which taught me far too much about bootdisks and .BAT programming.

Also its bootdrv.com is one of the smallest useful programs I've ever seen, clocking in at seven bytes.

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

#138

Post by endgame »

akhatri_aus wrote: post #105

Seeing this made me smile. I haven't seen an A drive for ages now. I dont know about the times before 1998 where most people have a nostalgic memory of these, but they used to self corrupt like crazy all you had to fear was the "Do you want to format Drive A?"

Once upon a midnight dreary, fingers cramped and vision bleary,

System manuals piled high and wasted paper on the floor,

Longing for the warmth of bedsheets,

Still I sat there, doing spreadsheets:

Having reached the bottom line,

I took a floppy from the drawer.

Typing with a steady hand, I then invoked the SAVE command

But got instead a reprimand: it read "Abort, Retry, Ignore."

http://badpets.net/Humor/Tech/NeverMore.html

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

#140

Post by philsnow »

adamb0mb1 wrote: post #96
nandhp wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everybody missed out -- I may not have done 40 floppies of WordPerfect, but I did install my first Debian (3.0 Woody) from a boot floppy, a root floppy, 4 driver floppies, and 20 base system floppies. http://www.debian.org/releases/woody/i386/ch-appendix.en.htm... http://archive.debian.org/debian/dists/woody/main/disks-i386... http://archive.debian.org/debian/dists/woody/main/disks-i386...

Oh man. Same experience, different distro. Slackware was a bunch of disks too (but I don't remember exactly how many)

It came on different disk sets; you really only needed the 'a' (base) set, but the 'n'etworking set was useful if you wanted the thing to connect to anything else.

IIRC there were also

    d:   development (gcc, make, etc)
    e:   emacs (I think; I used vim at the time)
    x:   X11 base system
    xap: X applications
    y:   bsd games
probably several more
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