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What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for?
71–80 of 149 posts
Re: What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for?
#72Re: What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for?
#73It'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.
Re: What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for?
#74My first mass storage was a PhiDeck, a tape cassette drive that stored data digitally and that had motors to load and unload the heads and seek. It had a file system, of sorts, that fit in about 6K of RAM. Effective data rate was about 9600 bits/second, and it usually took 20-30 seconds to launch a program. Primitive and slow as it was, it was still a vast improvement over audio cassettes. Later, I wrote a software U…
One of my favorites memories is my dad trying to copy a BBC Model B compact audio cassette without a cable ... speaker to microphone! He started it and crept out the room quietly closing the door behind him. It did not work.
Re: What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for?
#75We'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?!).
The way things are going we will probably not have any Save buttons at all soon.
Google Docs doesn't have any.
Re: What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for?
#76I had a Toshiba laptop once that came without any software floppies; instead at first boot you had to generate the installation floppies for windows 95 and MS Office. If I recall correctly it asked for something like 80 floppies. Nightmare.
Re: What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for?
#77It'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…
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...
Re: What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for?
#78And I've just noticed that the "save file" icon in word processors isn't a floppy disk as it used to be.
> And I've just noticed that the "save file" icon in word processors isn't a floppy disk as it used to be.
Maybe the one you're using. But the "Save" icon in the most popular word processor is a 3.5" floppy disk: http://i.imgur.com/WLFtT7A.png
This is the latest version -- Word 2013.
Re: What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for?
#79OMG, i'm getting too old.
When I was clearing out a cupboard the other day, my Son found an old cassette tape, he then proceeded to ask me what it was! I'm pretty sure in 20 more years we may see the same for CD ROMS or DVDs.
This particular post makes me feel so old though and I'm only 30 in a couple of weeks.
I remember buying Doom years ago and when I got the box it jangled round from all the discs inside of it.
I also remember when the first 24x speed CD drives came out, this is when hard drives were too expensive to load a full game on to so CD speed was important so your game didn't buffer as much.
Kids these days with their solid state iPads and 3D games consoles.
Blurgh
Re: What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for?
#80Earlier 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.
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.