This question makes me feel old. And I'm in my early twenties.
Friend of mine was trying to fix an ancient computer that had a 5¼" floppy drive. He thought it was a slot loading CD drive. The CD is stuck in there now.
For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?
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Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?
#72There are too many "this makes me feel old" in here. And in SO, for that matter. You snob folks...
Why does that make us snobs?
Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?
#73I remember a time when you needed to carry 30 floppies to be able to copy C&C:Red Alert... and it was worth it.
Same for when the demo of Quake came out, loved it.
I remember playing Quake on a 486 at 66 MHz.
Performance was terrible, but this was real 3D with a cool atmosphere. My Quake came on a CD though ... which I loved because of the included Nine Inch Nails soundtrack.
Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?
#74> "Please Insert Disk 13" OH GOD WHERE IS DISK 13, I CAN'T FIND DISK 13. - Jeff 16 hours ago I have exactly this memory as well. My first computer was a Compaq Deskpro Portable. It had a 5.25" floppy drive and a 40 MB hard disk. It was an embarrassment of riches - how could you ever fill up 40 whole mega bytes? Between that and my custom AUTOEXEC.BAT file, I was set. As it happens, I still have most of the files I cr…
Well windows 1.0 were only [1] 5 5.25" floppies and [2] 2 for MS-DOS and another one for write (the grandfather of word). I think i need a drive to try them again ;-) .
Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?
#75Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?
#76Makes you wonder, when will the floppy be discarded as the icon for 'save'?
Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because MsDos, at least in its early versions, could not dynamically assign new drive letters to newly inserted disks. So the workaround, which is still with us years later in Windows 7, was to reserve at boot time the first two letters (A/B) for drives with removable media (i.e., floppy drives, there were no usb flash dongles in those days).
I don't think that's true for Vista or Windows 7. I have B:\ as a Backup partition from my second HD on both.
Does your computer have a floppy drive?
Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?
#78My first computer didn't have disk drives at all - it used standard audio cassette tapes in standard audio cassette machines. I remember feeding the audio into an oscilliscope and reverse engineering the format used on the tape, then writing Z80 machine code (I didn't have an assember - I wrote actual hex opcodes and fed them into a program I wrote that read hex and poked the values into memory) to create tapes that…
Sounds a bit like you had a Sinclair ZX80. Been there, done that ;)
I also had a home computer featuring a Z80 CPU, compatible with the Sinclair.
But this one also featured a 3.5" floppy drive: http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=...
Sadly I sold it to a friend at some point.
Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?
#79My first computer didn't have disk drives at all - it used standard audio cassette tapes in standard audio cassette machines. I remember feeding the audio into an oscilliscope and reverse engineering the format used on the tape, then writing Z80 machine code (I didn't have an assember - I wrote actual hex opcodes and fed them into a program I wrote that read hex and poked the values into memory) to create tapes that…
A few years ago I went back to school for a bit. One day I was sitting with my classmates, average age about 18, discussing our first computers. I mentioned I got started on a Vic 20 with a tape drive. Suggested someone, "Was that so you could listen to music while you coded?". Took some effort to convince them I wasn't pulling their leg when I told them that it was used to save programmes to
Re: For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?
#80I recently bought my 13-year-old daughter a laptop with 8 gig of RAM. When I was 13, I was lucky enough to get a computer with 8 kb of RAM (and one of the 8 went to the operating system, so there were 7167 bytes free.)
There aren't too many areas where one generation translates to a million-fold improvement.