C:\Sierra\run
(midwest.social)
FenrirIII
Programmer Humorcross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/62743547
The upper letters have also lost their use with UNC paths. in the 2000's and 2010's, we had so many drive letters at my workplaces. I hardly used any of them, but they still mapped a bunch by default for departments that still relied on them. Now they're on NAS drives or SharePoint, which you can just access without mapping. I just pinned the ones I use in File Explorer so they're there but not "mapped".
I still have an F: drive on my current company machine for some reason. It used to be a network home directory backup, but after OneDrive, I'm not sure where it points or why it still exists. Because I'm the sort of person who sees a YouTube video about what happened to Novell Netware and I say "ooh" and click play, I recently learned that F: was the typical home drive letter for Novell Netware, with company/departmental share drives starting with G: or later. (https://support.novell.com/docs/Tids/Solutions/10027779.html) I remember in the early 2000's people still calling those drives and the login screen "Novell" even though it was Windows NT and NT shares by that point.
I mean I purchased an external floppy for my undergrad laptop as recently as... 2004... Oh shit that was 22 years ago... Fuck a kid born a year later can legally buy alcohol and a kid born then is graduating from undergraduate....
When did I get old?
People talk about the legacy of the floppy disk (mid-eighties to mid-aughts) being used as a save icon, but drive letters are even more extreme - and absurd - than that.
CP/M came out in 1974 and introduced drive letters A: and B: for floppy drives, and Microsoft copied that for DOS and the early DOS-based versions of Windows. Microsoft finally killed off the DOS lineage with Windows Me in 2000, so that was 26 years of drive letters actually being part of the OS' architecture.
Windows NT came out in 1993 - 19 years after CP/M - and didn't use drive letters but for the sake of backwards compatibility and familiarity it would emulate them. All versions of Windows since 2000 are based on NT. So we had 26 years of drive letters being needed, and 33 years of faking it for consistency.
I remember the first computer my family had, when i was around 5 hears old, was an old IBM something with a laborious switch to power it on. Like a flick switch that pulled a metal rod, i dont know the specifics but this rod must have moved something to complete and electrical circuit and the thing came to life.
It had 1 floppy drive and a blanker for a second. A: and B: were reserved for these drives. Windows 3.11 was installed from 12 floppy disks and we ran all of our games from DOS. Except lemmings which was built into the OS.
The box was horizontal, that classic beige colour and had the classic IBM 2 button mouse. No speakers. No modem. A 12 inch crt screen (in matching beige)
We had a dot matrix printer that we never replaced the ink ribbon for. So after that ran dry we just used the paper for drawing on.
I miss that machine.
I need a historical fantasy book in this concept.
I just need to pause and reflect on the level of commitment in that post. They started out strong, and just kept on going.
Absolutely outstanding.
I got you, OP…
C:\DOS
C:\DOS\RUN
RUN\DOS\RUN
But they were, all of them, deceived, for another drive was made.
Yeah /dev/sda
I found out about an unlimited drive that big tech doesn't want you to know about, it's called /dev/null
It's amazing how much you can store in /dev/null
Back in the XP era, I set a hard drive to B and random installers would refuse to target it because they insisted it was too small. Good times.
And the CD-ROM drive was D:
It was called "D" for "disk", duh.
(The above comment for legal purposes is a joke.)
"D" was actually used for "Drink Holder"
*disc
I was convinced I had seen the spelling 'disk' before, so I looked it up and found this (new to me) and interesting distinction on wiktionary.
In most varieties of English, disk is the preferred spelling for magnetic media (hence floppy disk, hard disk, disk drive), whereas disc is preferred for optical media (hence compact disc, digital versatile disc, optical disc). For all other uses, disk is preferred in American English and acceptable in Canadian English, and disc otherwise. Less commonly, disc is used for magnetic media (as in floppy disc and discette); similarly, disk is sometimes used for optical media, as in compact disk and optical disk.
But also both forms seem to be usable for geometric disc shapes.
Anyone: "In the beginning..."
My Freakin' Brain: "Inne de beninng-ing."
Tribute to all the old high priests who were executing the extended memory settings ritual based on each software requirements! We are the guardians of ancient knowledde!
You shall never be forgotten, sacred Amstrad 1512 DD, 512kB of RAM and Dual Drives, luxury of your time! Praise be to DR DOS an GEM Desktop!
We still pay homage to the old gods with the "save" icon
I was explaining to my kids about floppy disks, and mentioned the save icon. The what? The button you press to save. It just says "save" they said.
I think they use the Google suite at school, and apparently the save button just says "save". Although TBH I half expected them to not know of it because of auto-saving.
Me pressing ctrl-s all the time in a google docs window
Fun fact: that's why we call them icons.
They are trying to change those icons now, too. People dont recognize them so they use others.
I haven't seen that, any examples?
I don't why they'd change that either, just because they don't know the origin, they still grew up knowing it meant "save."
I remember seeing a program that used something else once, and when I worked in web apps and websites, there was always a debate about what to use.
A common one is a folder icon (or a tray) with a download arrow... DESPITE it being used to save locally. Same thing with a cloud with a down arrow.
Some other programs used to use the icon for a hard disk, the three circular platters.
If I remember the app, Ill give better examples of programs that use other things.
"And the bios sayeth unto the user: Come forth and insert disk 23 of 30. And they did so. When the needle of the drive tested the disk, it had become corrupted, verily."
"Thus the monkey of the isle demanded Disk 114 be inserteth. Yet there was no Disk 114 and much confusion was sewn."
Not joking but I did 1800 support for Windows 95 and at the end, right before 98, there was a constant problem with a specific floppy and people would like call us and we would try to send them a cd replacement but could send the fixed floppy. It was silly because it was the most common call for a bit. Like that batch of floppies all died at the same time
Windows people are starting to name their ssd a: and b:
It's horrible
I use B: for my BluRay drive. Seemed appropriate.
We won't talk about what ray the A: drive is.
The old ways are being forgotten. The oral history of the gray beards.
I had an xp install that defaulted my boot drive to H: and I never bothered to figure out why or change it.
H for Hard drive, duh 🤣
Eh, that sounds like a fun idea to me. I think it'd be nostalgic. I'm gonna look into that, actually :)
‘Dances with ribbons of mainframe tape’
Rise ye old ones RISE
It's a Windows convention, but, if you are old enough, it was a DOS convention and a CP/M convention.
Ah, Sierra. I played Return to Krondor back in the day, and it's a great game. Unfortunately, and if I remember correctly, the installer was kind of bugged. See, when you installed the game, it created a Sierra folder in your desired destination folder. But when you uninstalled it, it removed everything in the folder that contained the Sierra folder. I luckily installed it in my Games folder and only lost some games in the process. If you installed the game in to the root of you C drive and then uninstalled it... Well, you were in for a fun evening.
Thanks Sierra. I'm glad you're dead.
Well, bugs happen. I'm not as glad about them being dead, they had a ton of great titles, two of my favourite series being NOLF and Empire Earth
I was there, Gandalf.
My first computer was Tandy. 8088 chip, I think. Orange monochrome monitor. No hard drive, 2x 5.25 floppers. Folks' co-worker asked if anyone wanted it before tossing it out.
I'm not quite that old, though, there were the Apple IIs in the school lab.
I learned my first bit of programming right then, figuring out batch files. Everything had to be saved on disc immediately.
Man I was living the high life because this Tandy had a 2400 baud modem and I was soon acquainted with the wild world of BBSs.
I didn't care that it was in monochrome because playing Usurper or Trade Wars with strangers on someone's computer half a state away was way way cooler than the Nintendo, ha ha.
Man those were such good times.
That’s when computing was fun and interesting.
IBM PS/2 Model 50 for me. Loudest keyboard on earth.
clack clack clack
My first computer was Tandy. 8088 chip, I think. Orange monochrome monitor. No hard drive, 2x 5.25 floppers.
That sounds just like my first PC! I bought it secondhand in 1983 or 84. It was fancy because most monitors were green, and the two floppies meant you didn't have to remove the program disk to save a file. I remember laboriously typing out the code for Eliza, the first chatbot. I had a daisy wheel printer too - the paper was fan-fold and had sprocket holes down the sides.
That's awesome. I remember those printers. Perforated strips everywhere. Businesses had the green and white striped kind.
RadioShack Tandy 1000-TX was our first desktop.. Technically, I think we had a VIC20 for a couple weeks that was hooked up to our TV but it got returned and damn am I glad we got that IBM-compatible, CGA graphics, loud-ass behemoth.
I can still hear the sound of the floppy drives intializing on bootup. A: was 3.5" and B: was 5.25" and the way they sounded made my 6-year old self so happy. I used to make the noises myself as it came online.
Years later, when I write this post, I will think.. why did I ever doubt my autism diagnosis?
Ha ha, wow. Good times 🙂
i think even usb floppies show up as a:, don't they? i've not used windows for a decade now, thankfully.
i think even usb floppies show up as a:, don’t they?
They do. And virtual floppy drives on a virtual machine show up as A:/B: too.
You didn’t mention Arch. You’re not an Ubuntu user are you?
i'm a unix omnivore
https://kpatronas.itch.io/breadbin
that's rad
I experienced a time period where 3.5" discs coexisted with harddrives, but I've never seen a system where B: is actually used...
Going to show my age again now.
I think post 1990, they were rare. Essentially there was a time before that though, when computers often didn't have a hard drive. Because they were like 10MB and cost thousands of whatever your currency may be.
So in those days (8088/8086 based systems largely), it was common for there to be 2x5.25" drives. A: and B:. C: was a status symbol, the lambo of the early computer era.
As hard drives became more affordable (for levels of affordability), there was also the rise of the new disk type. 3.5". In that case it wasn't too uncommon to have a 3.5" drive, a 5.25" drive and a hard disk. So you'd have A:, B: and C:.
I think after the mid 90s the much more common setup was a single high density 3.5" drive A: and a hard disk C:. In the office we also had an F: drive (Novell netware network drive).
A: and B: were by and large kept free out of that history. I am pretty sure you can map HDDs/SSDs to them these days though if you want to.
Yeah, I had and used a number of PCs in the late 80s and mid 90s with the 3.5" A: and 5.25" B:. But my step dad was a programmer, so we had piles of both media around the house.
For that brief period in the mid-'90s I owned a PC with twin 3½" floppy drives. I never really used the second one, but I enjoyed the novelty and the fact that all my drive letters were in use. I also saw a handful of computers with both 3½" and 5¼" drives in some of the university PC labs. I don't think I ever saw anyone use the 5¼" slot of any of them, but the 3½" floppy drives got a decent amount of use.
Fun fact though: You could still use B: in DOS commands even if you only had an A: drive. The system would prompt you to switch disks as and when A: was about to pretend to be B: and then switch back afterwards.
Before hard drives it was pretty common for systems to have two floppy drives, A: and B:
I know about that, but I lack the personal experience.
I had an 8086 with a 5.25 and a 3.5”. You could always change their assignments in the bios if you wanted
My computer at home had a single floppy (and two 10MB hard drives C: and D:), but the one at the school used for MIDI was an actual IBM PC with two drives. We'd boot up on A: and save our projects on B:. :)
I had one, A: is where the CP/M boot disc lived and B: was for all the actual stuff.
The b: drive was usually used to speed up a disk copy, especially to multiple copies, it was way faster than swapping out the disks. Remember that sometimes the whole contents of a disk didn't fit in available memory. There was a lot of disk swapping.
You could also just keep the msdos disk in a: and execute software from b: Also sometimes a command required reading from the msdos disk. It was handy to have the boot disk always available.
I don't recall using any software that specifically required two drives, but no doubt it existed.
I’ve had both. Also you could use b: as a substitute for a: if you had only one drrive. It would then ask you yo insert a disk before accessing
Praise the omnisiah
Simple A: and B: were reserved for floppies and when hard drives came along C: was the next letter. There now you know..
I think one important detail that's missing in the OP is the reason you would have not one but two reserved floppy drives. It was so that you could copy files from one floppy to another and duplicate floppies much more easily. Also, when installing games that came on multiple floppies, you could have one drive going while you switched the other one out. For this reason both A: and B: ended up reserved for floppies, as many people had more than one.
Or because the OS was on A and the application was on B
i like to pretend the C stands for computer and that's why
TIL.
I was small when 5.25 floppies we're around. Never even questioned "C:"
I was too young to catch the 5.25 ones, but had a 3.5 floppy drive. For me the question was more of "where did B: go?"
A: had the DOS used to boot the computer, B: had the application. There was no C:. Then 5.25 floppies died and most people didn't see the need for a second 3.5 drive, hence A: and B:
No one ever used the B:
Games needing two floppies only worked in the A: or so it was for me...
B: was nice for copying things onto a second floppy.
Ah yeah that's correct!
They had pesky anti copy stuff back then too though.
8” floppy disks came before that.
-old man
Yeah, aside from seeing them at a museum, I never saw them in use!
How floppy were they in comparison to the 5s?
lol I never saw one. Just heard the legends.
I remember A: being a floppy drive, but I never thought of hard being the opposite of floppy, lol
The disks inside the metal box is the hard drive, 3.5 disks were hard enough but the disks themselves were floppy
Both disks inside are “floppy”. It’s just a magnetic sheet.
“floppy” disks got their name from where they were floppy entirely, in their 8-inch then 5.25-inch form. That was before the hard shell 3.5-inch that you are remembering.
Hard disks absolutely are hard inside, and floppies are floppy (modulo a plastic cover with a metal slide). I think you might be mixed up.
Ha indeed, nope never knew that.
However, 5.25” floppy’s are floppy on the outside. I assume that’s where they got their name.
Hard disk I just assumed we called it opposite of a floppy back in 1986 when I got a 20MB drive for my PC Jr. lol
What did you think hdd stood for?
Hard disk drive? Not sure what you are aiming at here
Why are some of the letters in the text weirdly "elongated"?
I lowkey tried to decipher the hidden message before I realised the weird letters are all in a straight vertical line. Looks like someone may have imperfectly stitched two screenshots together, for whatever reason.
Wait, you're right! Well spotted!
I always label my secondary and tertiary drive A and B these days
But what of the fabled and cursed other, D: drive?
In my mind it will always and forever be the CD-ROM drive, but any drive added to a standard Windows system (including partitions) will just continue the alphabet from C. So if you install a second hard drive (or partition your only one) it will become D, the next one will be E, and so on:
I’ll leave it to someone else to convey this in a biblical fashion.
CD? Ohh those the weird disco frisbees that ruined audio vibes!
/s
Compact Frisbees
Fabled? It's perfectly ordinary. I see the D drive all the time. At home it used to be an HDD to store things that didn't need the speed of the SSD (media, documents, etc), and now it's where USB drives end up on my work laptop.
D: for op~~d~~tical drive.
Depends. My first system had two hard drives, which came before optical drives, so I had C: and D: and then E: was my optical drive.
There were times when a Windows reinstall would name the system drive E: instead of C:, usually if one tried to reinstall without reformatting. That was truly, horribly cursed.
You can only boot from the C Drive these days because a modern BIOS AI has such a small model it can only read at a first grade level. The first commands it understands are C Drive "the discovery command", C Drive Run "initial boot", Run Drive Run "OS handover".
simpsons did it
Damn A and B are just like El and Baal fr fr
You know… someone somewhere MUST have built a system using two floppies and, like, a CD drive or something.
Also, trivial fact while I'm here that some may not know about: If your system only had one physical floppy, you could still use A: and B:. When you switched, it would prompt you (iirc) to swap the diskettes.
A CD drive but no hard disk? ~~I don't know of a DOS/Windows that would accept such a thing.~~
edit: nonsense
CD drivers did exist for DOS and you could absolutely boot up a system with one or two floppies, and one optical drive. MSCDEX.EXE was apparently what allowed you to connect to the optical drive.
You're totally right. You could put DOS on one floppy and the driver on the other or just load it into RAM.
https://archive.org/details/dos-with-cd-rom-support
I never did it - by the time I had an optical drive, I had hard drives - but I kinda wish I had such a system. So wild to have like 500 times the data on a CD (much less DVD) than the floppied you booted from! lol.
Imagine the chaos if you could write to multi-writable CDs, too. lol. THat would have been wild.
Yeah, like how it's dumb for kids to not know about dialling rotary phones, manually tuning in a TV with a knob, being afraid of burning themselves of the incandescent bulb in their bedside lamp or rewinding a VHS tape before ejecting it from the VCR.
That's not "dumb", it's "not knowing a thing" and I'm sure you do it too.
How it is dumb? There's no reason for anyone who wasn't alive then to know about A and B drives.
I still can't get over that windows boxes can't have more than 23 drives connected, excluding C. Just absolutely hilarious ineptitude. Similarly the case insensitive filesystem makes it so the vast majority of file operations don't work [in all cases like they should].
You should be able to name a drive with any Unicode character. Yes, including emoji.
Not true, you can connect as many Drives as physically possible, but they won't all have letters assigned. I think there's a way to access a drive without a letter, but anyway you can still mount it as a path under an existing letter.
don't forget the invisible pseudo-files that follow you around the tree in case you need to print something from a dos program
ah the glory days of sierra games.
C:[Enter]###
you forgot the second :
love me some Devy
Never heard of 'em!
A and b were floppy drives. It’s not hard people.
/dev/sda yet another reason Linux is bett'a
