I was adding a second drive to a Windows desktop the other day and was tempted to assign it A:. I just couldn't do it, though. It felt like I was violating some unspoken rule.
Knowing Windows there's some legacy piece of code that checks if there's a floppy in drive A: and assigning a drive to it makes the OS fail to boot or something.
Some dumbass at my workplace assigned a network folder to D:, and made it a department standard (along with 20 other network folders assigned their own drive letters) and so now you can't access external drives if you restart the computer with one plugged in.
Because windows assigns D:\ to the flash drive before user initialization, and then overwrites it with the network drive when they log in, which breaks both for that session.
I wonder how UEFI treats it; diskette drives were kind of sacred in the old BIOS days. How modern Windows handles it is anyone's guess, I'm sure it's been rewritten by Copilot by now.
About 15 years ago there was a company I did some work for (I was at an MSP at the time) who wanted to virtualize certain systems. Great. No problem. Except those systems needed to read floppies. Ok, I can pass it through. Except they wanted to get away from floppies. Great, let's get you a newer system from a different vendor because this one went out of business when NT4 was still the big dog. Nope, too much money and the process would change.
So I had to reregister every DLL by hand because the installation didn't work on Server 2008 r2. And every few months it would have to be done again because one of the guys thought himself a genius and kept messing up the janky ass workflow we put together to download info from thumb drives to a virtual floppy.
So plug in the drive, janky ass script creates a virtual floppy in drive A of the server, and manually (eventually I just wrote a script because I didn't want to get that call on a Saturday) register each DLL every so often. And they'd rather pay the company I worked for several hundred dollars a month than pay a couple of grand one time that would have paid for itself in less than a year.
lol .... I had this kind of argument with my wife for years.
She kept buying the smallest bottles of dish washing liquid for years ... if it was smaller, to her it was much cheaper. I kept telling her that the price for the small bottle was more expensive per liter of liquid compared to buying it all in bulk.
I kept telling her that if you just bought one giant bottle for the best price when it went on sale, you'd end up buying more liquid and saving money over time. I'd buy a big huge bottle every year or so and it would last us months, then she'd revert to buying small bottles again.
Eventually, she realized that it was cheaper in the long run to buying big bottles .... mostly because when you bought one giant bottle, you'd forget the problem altogether for about six months or even a year.
I know an OAP who pays two lots of $59 a month for two mobile phones. 'you get more calls that way'. But it's a big data plan - even the smallest phone plans have unlimited calls. Heck, one is a flip phone with no data. Can't convince her she only needs to pay $23 each though.
Heads up. Vendors are on to us. Bulk now equals convenience. Double check unit prices before assuming buying the larger quantity is more cost effective.
Sometimes there's is now a small, medium and large package and medium is the best buy.
Seriously though you've sent me down a rabbit hole that doesn't have a satisfactory ending (yet). Some kind of LPC to FDC adapter seems to be potentially possible on some motherboards, but haven't found any concrete evidence of someone having done that yet.
Most practical solution is to use an external USB drive, strip the casing, print a plate and wire the cable to the onboard USB header on the mobo.
ZIP drives were a game changer at the time. We had no other (fast) way to move larger amounts of data in one shot without compressing / archiving over multiple disks.
Last year I dug a couple hundred zip disks out of my parents attic and bought an old zip drive off eBay so I could read them. They all still worked. My old data got moved to the cloud and the zip discs + drive went back to the attic. Perhaps in another 20 years I'll dig it out again if we still have USB ports on our systems haha.
Anyways, the USB thumb drive business killed iomega overnight.
Fellow zip and jaz drive enjoyer, those were halcyon days. Grandfather’s (and by extension, my first) PC was an IBM dual 5.25, and I still remember buying my first 2x cdrw, by TDK. Thing was finicky as all fuck and wasted many a burn, but it’s was glorious and burned my first mp3 CD.
In fairness, it was largely a convenience tax. Through my Atari ST, early PC, and (to a minimal degree) Amiga days, two or more drives just reduced the need for disk-swapping.
However... I'm not saying things were done on an industrial scale; but Xcopy with two drives was like trading a Vauxhall Nova for a Lambo Countach.
I'm never really sure if I should be using /mnt, or /media, or neither, or both.
That's just one of many things that I find a bit confusing about the main linux directories. Windows has many directory oddities too though. I guess that tends to happen when an old OS walks the fine line of maintaining backwards compatibility and conventions while expectations, needs, and best-practices gradually change over time.
General convention is that /media is for removable media that is automounted and that /mnt is for permanent devices. Some distros automount to /run/media instead of /media though.
Convention aside, you can mount to anywhere you like.
Windows, like DOS and CP/M before it, was designed for a standalone microcomputer that the user had physical access to, so they lettered the drives A, B, and C, That would allow mounting 26 drives which should be enough for everybody forever.
Linux, like UNIX before it, was designed to run on a minicomputer in a university basement accessed through a dumb terminal where the end user has no physical access to the hardware, so the file system presents as completely abstract.
In the modern paradigm of local PCs attached to network storage, both approaches have their disadvantages.
Drive letters feel obvious from a user perspective, and I presume that's part of the reason for their invention - each physical disk (or partition) gets a letter, and we're done! Problem solved.
The Linux paradigm is pretty different in that every device is a file, and files can mount anywhere. (And that really does mean every device, not just disks. Even your mouse is a file and you can read mouse events via the filesystem)
The approach has a huge amount of flexibility. Most obviously, file systems can logically mount anywhere in the directory tree, so you can organise disks and network mounts anywhere you want them and never run out of letters.
It's a perfectly reasonable pattern for example to want your OS files to be on one partition, and your user home folder where you store your files on another. On Windows that would mean ignoring all the default Documents, Pictures etc folders, trying not to use them (and making sure other apps and programs which like to don't) and using D:/ for files. On Linux you can mount your storage right in your home folder, and everything still works just as it would if it were a single disk.
I can see why you miss Windows, but the unix-like approach is a powerful abstraction when you're used to it - just quite different.
To be fair to Windows, it's just a right click on the special folder (documents, pictures etc) - properties - location. You can place them wherever you like.
A and B were reserved and your first hard disk drive was C.
The two disk drives had fixed memory addresses because they were often specific ports on the motherboard, and loaded the OS, etc. Things after that were more dynamic.
Oh yeah, that reminds me of that time SO's PC had C: for the OS and D: for data and wanted to format it, so i booted it to DOS (i think it was still win 98 SE) and happily formatted C: only to discover that in DOS i was actually formatting D:... fun times.
Fun thing, when you attach a USB floppy drive on a modern Windows 11 system, it'll dutifully give it drive letter A: and even has a floppy drive icon. (Which admittedly doesn't look like a floppy drive. At all. But it has a floppy!)
And why yes, I've seen it a time or two in recent years, because I've been archiving some stuff. Imaging shitloads of old floppies.
Every Windows is built on every generation before it. All sorts of legacy stuff is hidden and embedded inside that still works that's useless. Dialer.exe still runs from the Run cmd. Com/LPT1 stuff should still be there for old printers.
I personally don't have the heart to say any of the legacy support stuff is completely useless. I mean, yeah, Windows has support for floppy drives (through standard USB mass storage), but you know what? I can image old floppies through it. If Windows recognises floppy drives and gives it drive letter A, that's not that much of bloat really, just an entry in a list or something.
And also most Linux distributions also have ancient-ass legacy stuff, though admittedly usually you need to specifically install it and maybe even hack a bit to get it to work again. ...why yes, I am going to do physical terminal stuff one day, 1980s style, and I'll be very mad if I need to hack serial getty support in the hard way!
I absolutely adore the old wild west landscape that was the old 8 bit micros. There were some really wacky things that were tried out, both from a technical aspect and a UX aspect
Devices 2-7 are available as various pieces of hardware if you have the hardware.
It doesn't say this, but I suspect that disks received a higher default number than printers because the 1541 disk drive went to market after several printers were already on the market.
If I understand correctly, the 1541 was initially launched for the VIC20, where the datasette and several Commodore printers that would remain compatible with the VIC20, C64 and later were PET-era. This is what I think I've learned from Youtube, mine was an IBM household since before I was born.
Ah, printers, of course (and other things). I have no idea what my Okidata printer was set up with, I never did printing with anything but an application that did it internally. Yes, disk drives were a luxury item for a while. The big thing was those running the first BBSes who had a pricey, enormous 20 MB hard drive.
I miss floppies. Putting them in and taking them out was so satisfying. Remember when you had to install stuff with like a hundred of them? The ker-chicks and that smooth sliding feel as the sheath slid open....
I had reason to use an optical drive lately, and even that was a blast from the past. Hitting eject, watching the light blink and then the drawer opens. USB-based storage just isn't the same.
I regularly use optical drives for the movies. Why should I pay twice the price to "buy" some movie from Apple or Google? I rather wait 2 days for the mailman to deliver me a Blu-ray that doesn't only have better quality, but also keeps working when some company decides to stop licensing the stuff I purportedly "bought". Second-hand discs sometimes cost as much as 1€.
But well, I might be a bit old school, as I just got a few new vinyls delivered to me the other day.
Funnily enough, the main place I worry about resolution is on a desktop computer doing desktop computer stuff. My 1440p ultrawide is kind of decadent for games, but when I'm doing something I just want a bunch of real estate.
Just watching TV or movies...honestly I think I might like lower resolutions more. I've got a copy of Master and Commander on "fullscreen" DVD, 480p 4:3. I'd really like it to be 16:9 but I can't come up with complaints about the video quality. I get immersed in that movie just fine at DVD quality. I've got a few films on Blu-Ray, and at 1080p film grain starts being noticeable. And the graininess of the shot changes from scene to scene as the film crew had to use different film stock and camera settings for different lighting conditions, so I spend the whole movie going "That scene looks pretty good, oh that's grainy as hell, now it's better." Lower resolutions and/or bitrates smooth that out, but I think they actively preserve it on Blu-Ray because the data fits on the disc, there's no internet pipe to push it down, and film grain is "authentic."
So at 4k, it's either going to display a level of detail that I'm sitting too far from the screen to notice, it's going to look even noisier, or it'll be smeared by compression rather than resolution because of bitrate limitations. So...?
Yeah, I always thought the drive letters weren't a very elegant solution to the problem. Can have only 26 devices. Should just use numbers. You can fit 256 devices in one-byte integer identifier! Like how tape drive is 1 and printer is 4 and floppy drives are 8, 9 and so on.
OMV (NAS OS based on Debian) assigns each drive a UUID and mounts them under that. It takes a bit time to get used to, but already paid off when I had to shuffle around drives and cards cause of an upgrade.
I'm glad my punch tape drive is long gone. We used a paper punch tape reel to reel on a garden cart to wheel around the shop floor to load CNC programs onto CNC mills. Often with hand written gcode. Gods, I hated that thing. Floppies were far faster and far more reliable.
I always found it strange how windows treated drives. Who decided an alphabetical letter should be another mounted system? And also shares having the same naming. So strange...
I set my memory card reader to the letter A, but I also have my old Lightscribe DVD drive (and looking for one optical drive for my ThinkPad), and have a few floppy drives put away for potential hobby projects.
I think I still have a few 3 1/2" and even 5 1/4" around here somewhere. I even had a 120mb Superdisk drive. I bought it used and got 4 or 5 years of use from it. It could hold 1000's of CNC programs and even CAD drawings.
***Great Googlely Moogely! You can still get Super disks on eBay!
134 Comments
aeronmelon@lemmy.world · 182 pts · 256d
TypFaffke@feddit.org · 4 pts · 255d
B is the real grandpa
kersploosh@sh.itjust.works · 132 pts · 256d
I was adding a second drive to a Windows desktop the other day and was tempted to assign it
A:. I just couldn't do it, though. It felt like I was violating some unspoken rule.BootLoop@sh.itjust.works · 101 pts · 256d
Knowing Windows there's some legacy piece of code that checks if there's a floppy in drive A: and assigning a drive to it makes the OS fail to boot or something.
DarkSirrush@piefed.ca · 36 pts · 256d
Some dumbass at my workplace assigned a network folder to D:, and made it a department standard (along with 20 other network folders assigned their own drive letters) and so now you can't access external drives if you restart the computer with one plugged in.
Because windows assigns D:\ to the flash drive before user initialization, and then overwrites it with the network drive when they log in, which breaks both for that session.
AtariDump@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 255d
..………. Fuck.
TheOneAndOnly@lemmy.world · 14 pts · 256d
I 100% assumed the same thing. Lol
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works · 6 pts · 256d
I wonder how UEFI treats it; diskette drives were kind of sacred in the old BIOS days. How modern Windows handles it is anyone's guess, I'm sure it's been rewritten by Copilot by now.
ininewcrow@lemmy.ca · 79 pts · 256d
It's a code of honour at this point .... no one uses A: in respect for all those drives that died for our sins
TexasDrunk@lemmy.world · 31 pts · 256d
About 15 years ago there was a company I did some work for (I was at an MSP at the time) who wanted to virtualize certain systems. Great. No problem. Except those systems needed to read floppies. Ok, I can pass it through. Except they wanted to get away from floppies. Great, let's get you a newer system from a different vendor because this one went out of business when NT4 was still the big dog. Nope, too much money and the process would change.
So I had to reregister every DLL by hand because the installation didn't work on Server 2008 r2. And every few months it would have to be done again because one of the guys thought himself a genius and kept messing up the janky ass workflow we put together to download info from thumb drives to a virtual floppy.
So plug in the drive, janky ass script creates a virtual floppy in drive A of the server, and manually (eventually I just wrote a script because I didn't want to get that call on a Saturday) register each DLL every so often. And they'd rather pay the company I worked for several hundred dollars a month than pay a couple of grand one time that would have paid for itself in less than a year.
ininewcrow@lemmy.ca · 21 pts · 256d
lol .... I had this kind of argument with my wife for years.
She kept buying the smallest bottles of dish washing liquid for years ... if it was smaller, to her it was much cheaper. I kept telling her that the price for the small bottle was more expensive per liter of liquid compared to buying it all in bulk.
I kept telling her that if you just bought one giant bottle for the best price when it went on sale, you'd end up buying more liquid and saving money over time. I'd buy a big huge bottle every year or so and it would last us months, then she'd revert to buying small bottles again.
Eventually, she realized that it was cheaper in the long run to buying big bottles .... mostly because when you bought one giant bottle, you'd forget the problem altogether for about six months or even a year.
BagOfHeavyStones@piefed.social · 4 pts · 256d
I know an OAP who pays two lots of $59 a month for two mobile phones. 'you get more calls that way'. But it's a big data plan - even the smallest phone plans have unlimited calls. Heck, one is a flip phone with no data. Can't convince her she only needs to pay $23 each though.
TurtleTourParty@midwest.social · 2 pts · 255d
If she's in the US several MVMOs have unlimited talk and text for like $10 a month
korazail@lemmy.myserv.one · 2 pts · 255d
Heads up. Vendors are on to us. Bulk now equals convenience. Double check unit prices before assuming buying the larger quantity is more cost effective.
Sometimes there's is now a small, medium and large package and medium is the best buy.
Kowowow@lemmy.ca · 4 pts · 256d
Oh thumb drive to virtual floppy sounds like when I had to work on old cnc machines that had a few modern upgrades
airbornestar@lemmy.zip · 13 pts · 256d
Don't worry about it. That rule hasn't been relevant in a long time since we no longer use floppy disks
TemplaerDude@sh.itjust.works · 15 pts · 256d
My PC still has a floppy disc drive
Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works · 11 pts · 256d
Hipster?
TemplaerDude@sh.itjust.works · 15 pts · 256d
Nah it’s just like 11 years old and I still had some floppies sitting around back then with stuff on it. I haven’t used it in years.
piccolo@sh.itjust.works · 8 pts · 256d
Even 11 years old, unless its an industrial computer... how does it have FDD connector?
BeardedGingerWonder@feddit.uk · 2 pts · 255d
Just plug in an ISA card, duh.
Seriously though you've sent me down a rabbit hole that doesn't have a satisfactory ending (yet). Some kind of LPC to FDC adapter seems to be potentially possible on some motherboards, but haven't found any concrete evidence of someone having done that yet.
Most practical solution is to use an external USB drive, strip the casing, print a plate and wire the cable to the onboard USB header on the mobo.
This may get further research 😂
TemplaerDude@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 255d
You know, I actually don’t know, it was a gift from my father who paid for it to get built, I’ve never actually checked the connection…
atomicbocks@sh.itjust.works · 7 pts · 256d
I keep my storage hard drive assigned to B so the optical drive is still D.
frostysauce@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 256d
You monster.
A_Very_Big_Fan@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 256d
I assigned my 18TB HDD to A because my second drive is B and my main drive is C, so I have to complete the pattern or my brain will explode.
ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca · 4 pts · 256d
Make it G: violate unspoken rules.
Bluewing@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 255d
If you have never assigned a drive to F: or G:, how can you even say you lived?
JoMiran@lemmy.ml · 108 pts · 256d
My first PC is still in storage. It had
nucleative@lemmy.world · 33 pts · 256d
ZIP drives were a game changer at the time. We had no other (fast) way to move larger amounts of data in one shot without compressing / archiving over multiple disks.
Last year I dug a couple hundred zip disks out of my parents attic and bought an old zip drive off eBay so I could read them. They all still worked. My old data got moved to the cloud and the zip discs + drive went back to the attic. Perhaps in another 20 years I'll dig it out again if we still have USB ports on our systems haha.
Anyways, the USB thumb drive business killed iomega overnight.
X@piefed.world · 19 pts · 256d
Fellow zip and jaz drive enjoyer, those were halcyon days. Grandfather’s (and by extension, my first) PC was an IBM dual 5.25, and I still remember buying my first 2x cdrw, by TDK. Thing was finicky as all fuck and wasted many a burn, but it’s was glorious and burned my first mp3 CD.
jqubed@lemmy.world · 19 pts · 256d
I remember feeling cool when we got our ZIP 250 drive
kindernacht@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 256d
This is the way
user1234@lemmynsfw.com · 4 pts · 256d
This is the way
Medic8teMe@lemmy.ca · 2 pts · 256d
I have a 5.25 floppy in my shop just as a reminder of the past. I wonder what I burned on it decades ago it all the time.
PartyAt15thAndSummit@lemmy.zip · 3 pts · 255d
You burned floppy discs?
Medic8teMe@lemmy.ca · 2 pts · 255d
Copied. Burned. The terminology changed a lot and I got old.
BanMe@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 255d
On the lower density 5.25s, you can actually write the data by hand using a wood burning kit.
Alphonsus@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 255d
rockerface@lemmy.cafe · 64 pts · 256d
B:entered the chatSemi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world · 36 pts · 256d
Dudes with a
B:were 1337PhobosAnomaly@feddit.uk · 24 pts · 256d
and/or well financially off.
In fairness, it was largely a convenience tax. Through my Atari ST, early PC, and (to a minimal degree) Amiga days, two or more drives just reduced the need for disk-swapping.
However... I'm not saying things were done on an industrial scale; but Xcopy with two drives was like trading a Vauxhall Nova for a Lambo Countach.
HakFoo@lemmy.sdf.org · 14 pts · 256d
There was also a period where you needed 3.5 AND 5.25 drives to use off the shelf software.
PhobosAnomaly@feddit.uk · 9 pts · 256d
holy jesus, I thought I'd banished the actual floppy disk to the back of my mind, particularly the DS ones.
You know what, it's easy to rag on the devs at the time, but they worked with what they had. Good on them.
marine_mustang@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 256d
Yeah, that’s around where I came in. Although I did have an old 386 with two 5.25” drives and no hard drive.
ReluctantMuskrat@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 255d
A 386 with no hard drive was crazy even then. My first was an 8088 (though technically a NEC v20) with a 5.25" and a 20 MB hard drive
BagOfHeavyStones@piefed.social · 1 pts · 256d
Then there was me with A: and B: but no C: in my Sanyo luggable.
I tried adding an MFM drive and controller, but the power supply wasn't having a bar of that.
nonentity@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 256d
B: entered before the pins 0xA-0xF twist.
Agent641@lemmy.world · 55 pts · 256d
If you're not setting emojis as your drive letters, you're living in the past.
Incidentally, don't open the 😳: drive
InternetCitizen2@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 256d
😈
PartyAt15thAndSummit@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 255d
🦫🐈🐇🦇🦋🌮🦪
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
diffaldo@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 1 pts · 256d
Fav drive
glitchdx@lemmy.world · 28 pts · 256d
Drive letters are one of the few things I miss about windows now that I'm on linux.
Gonzako@lemmy.world · 22 pts · 256d
Yeah, but /mnt/ has its upsides!
ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca · 28 pts · 256d
/mnt/a
ThisGuyThat@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 256d
/mnt/win
blind3rdeye@aussie.zone · 5 pts · 256d
I'm never really sure if I should be using /mnt, or /media, or neither, or both.
That's just one of many things that I find a bit confusing about the main linux directories. Windows has many directory oddities too though. I guess that tends to happen when an old OS walks the fine line of maintaining backwards compatibility and conventions while expectations, needs, and best-practices gradually change over time.
MagnificentSteiner@lemmy.zip · 6 pts · 256d
General convention is that /media is for removable media that is automounted and that /mnt is for permanent devices. Some distros automount to /run/media instead of /media though.
Convention aside, you can mount to anywhere you like.
Ziglin@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 255d
My drives live in my home directory lol
SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org · 6 pts · 256d
Literally does not matter. You can mount them right on your desktop if you want.
piccolo@sh.itjust.works · 18 pts · 256d
Drives letters are a pain in the ass. Especially when working with network drives.
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works · 4 pts · 256d
Windows, like DOS and CP/M before it, was designed for a standalone microcomputer that the user had physical access to, so they lettered the drives A, B, and C, That would allow mounting 26 drives which should be enough for everybody forever.
Linux, like UNIX before it, was designed to run on a minicomputer in a university basement accessed through a dumb terminal where the end user has no physical access to the hardware, so the file system presents as completely abstract.
In the modern paradigm of local PCs attached to network storage, both approaches have their disadvantages.
Magnum@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 1 pts · 256d
tiramichu@sh.itjust.works · 7 pts · 256d
Drive letters feel obvious from a user perspective, and I presume that's part of the reason for their invention - each physical disk (or partition) gets a letter, and we're done! Problem solved.
The Linux paradigm is pretty different in that every device is a file, and files can mount anywhere. (And that really does mean every device, not just disks. Even your mouse is a file and you can read mouse events via the filesystem)
The approach has a huge amount of flexibility. Most obviously, file systems can logically mount anywhere in the directory tree, so you can organise disks and network mounts anywhere you want them and never run out of letters.
It's a perfectly reasonable pattern for example to want your OS files to be on one partition, and your user home folder where you store your files on another. On Windows that would mean ignoring all the default Documents, Pictures etc folders, trying not to use them (and making sure other apps and programs which like to don't) and using D:/ for files. On Linux you can mount your storage right in your home folder, and everything still works just as it would if it were a single disk.
I can see why you miss Windows, but the unix-like approach is a powerful abstraction when you're used to it - just quite different.
BagOfHeavyStones@piefed.social · 2 pts · 256d
To be fair to Windows, it's just a right click on the special folder (documents, pictures etc) - properties - location. You can place them wherever you like.
drath@lemmy.world · 28 pts · 256d
Of course I know him, he's me!
/dev/sda1
arschflugkoerper@feddit.org · 14 pts · 256d
I think the equivalent would be /dev/fd0 or something like that
LarsIsCool@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 256d
TIL https://askubuntu.com/a/1356812
TastyWheat@lemmy.world · 26 pts · 256d
Brrrrr ck
Cachk-cachk
Nrrrrrrrrrr
Yeah i can hear that drive letter 35 years after the fact
Fmstrat@lemmy.world · 24 pts · 256d
I just realized I had forgotten about drive letters altogether.
Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world · 17 pts · 256d
I’ve been a Mac user since 1989 and what is A:?
ETA: Never change Lemmy
Khanzarate@lemmy.world · 25 pts · 256d
Floppy disk drive.
A and B were reserved and your first hard disk drive was C.
The two disk drives had fixed memory addresses because they were often specific ports on the motherboard, and loaded the OS, etc. Things after that were more dynamic.
kersploosh@sh.itjust.works · 7 pts · 256d
Look at Mr. System 6 over here! I grew up on System 7 myself.
I bet you were transferring all your files over the internet encoded in BinHex format, eh?
Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 256d
It was actually System 1. My dad bought an old used Mac because the GUI made more sense than the DOS PCs in his price range.
msage@programming.dev · 5 pts · 256d
Weird corpo syntax for automatic mounts under an old OS.
waterSticksToMyBalls@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 256d
https://superuser.com/questions/231273/what-are-the-windows-a-and-b-drives-used-for#233284
Blizzard@lemmy.zip · 5 pts · 256d
Floppy disk drive
SystemL@literature.cafe · 16 pts · 255d
not me with my
/dev/sda
Cabbage_Pout61@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 255d
/dev/sdA
0x0@lemmy.zip · 16 pts · 256d
Oh yeah, that reminds me of that time SO's PC had
C:for the OS andD:for data and wanted to format it, so i booted it to DOS (i think it was still win 98 SE) and happily formattedC:only to discover that in DOS i was actually formattingD:... fun times.umbraroze@slrpnk.net · 16 pts · 255d
Fun thing, when you attach a USB floppy drive on a modern Windows 11 system, it'll dutifully give it drive letter A: and even has a floppy drive icon. (Which admittedly doesn't look like a floppy drive. At all. But it has a floppy!)
And why yes, I've seen it a time or two in recent years, because I've been archiving some stuff. Imaging shitloads of old floppies.
minkymunkey_7_7@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 255d
Every Windows is built on every generation before it. All sorts of legacy stuff is hidden and embedded inside that still works that's useless. Dialer.exe still runs from the Run cmd. Com/LPT1 stuff should still be there for old printers.
umbraroze@slrpnk.net · 4 pts · 255d
I personally don't have the heart to say any of the legacy support stuff is completely useless. I mean, yeah, Windows has support for floppy drives (through standard USB mass storage), but you know what? I can image old floppies through it. If Windows recognises floppy drives and gives it drive letter A, that's not that much of bloat really, just an entry in a list or something.
And also most Linux distributions also have ancient-ass legacy stuff, though admittedly usually you need to specifically install it and maybe even hack a bit to get it to work again. ...why yes, I am going to do physical terminal stuff one day, 1980s style, and I'll be very mad if I need to hack serial getty support in the hard way!
otp@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 255d
To be fair, you occasionally need to "hack" Linux a bit to get modern stuff working, too
HugeNerd@lemmy.ca · 5 pts · 255d
Yeah and if you put a second one it's B:. At least on my slowly dying 7 machine.
brianary@lemmy.zip · 15 pts · 256d
When I'm on Windows, I use
subst A: %USERPROFILE%\GitHubto mount my local repos as drive A for shorter paths.PartyAt15thAndSummit@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 255d
Neat.
thethunderwolf@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 15 pts · 256d
drive letters are cursed
cheesybuddha@lemmy.world · 14 pts · 256d
Shit man, take me back to the ",8,1" days
circuitfarmer@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 256d
cheesybuddha@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 256d
I absolutely adore the old wild west landscape that was the old 8 bit micros. There were some really wacky things that were tried out, both from a technical aspect and a UX aspect
circuitfarmer@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 256d
Rhaedas@fedia.io · 3 pts · 256d
I started with ",1,1". I never found a reason why they went from 1 for cassette to 8-15 for disk. Must have been a bit indicator thing.
mkwt@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 256d
Devices 2-7 are available as various pieces of hardware if you have the hardware.
It doesn't say this, but I suspect that disks received a higher default number than printers because the 1541 disk drive went to market after several printers were already on the market.
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works · 3 pts · 256d
If I understand correctly, the 1541 was initially launched for the VIC20, where the datasette and several Commodore printers that would remain compatible with the VIC20, C64 and later were PET-era. This is what I think I've learned from Youtube, mine was an IBM household since before I was born.
Rhaedas@fedia.io · 1 pts · 255d
Ah, printers, of course (and other things). I have no idea what my Okidata printer was set up with, I never did printing with anything but an application that did it internally. Yes, disk drives were a luxury item for a while. The big thing was those running the first BBSes who had a pricey, enormous 20 MB hard drive.
BagOfHeavyStones@piefed.social · 1 pts · 256d
+++ath
rizzothesmall@sh.itjust.works · 14 pts · 256d
Who here remembers turning part of the ide cable round to add a second floppy drive?
piccolo@sh.itjust.works · 8 pts · 256d
Probably noone because floppys dont use ide.
BagOfHeavyStones@piefed.social · 1 pts · 256d
Are you sure it was IDE? I remember jumpers for master, slave, and Cable Select so you're probably right.
I think it might have also applied to floppy drives or MFM / ESDI drives but that is going back a while.
rizzothesmall@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 255d
It was actually an FDD cable which was 34 pins instead of 40 for the IDE cable. My mistake!
lividweasel@lemmy.world · 14 pts · 256d
I don’t get it. What was the Q:?
falseWhite@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 256d
urandom@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 256d
That's where you put the save icon
SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 13 pts · 256d
I miss floppies. Putting them in and taking them out was so satisfying. Remember when you had to install stuff with like a hundred of them? The ker-chicks and that smooth sliding feel as the sheath slid open....
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works · 6 pts · 256d
I had reason to use an optical drive lately, and even that was a blast from the past. Hitting eject, watching the light blink and then the drawer opens. USB-based storage just isn't the same.
brotundspiele@sh.itjust.works · 3 pts · 255d
I regularly use optical drives for the movies. Why should I pay twice the price to "buy" some movie from Apple or Google? I rather wait 2 days for the mailman to deliver me a Blu-ray that doesn't only have better quality, but also keeps working when some company decides to stop licensing the stuff I purportedly "bought". Second-hand discs sometimes cost as much as 1€.
But well, I might be a bit old school, as I just got a few new vinyls delivered to me the other day.
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 255d
Something I recently learned: it is outright impossible to legally play 4k blu rays on PC.
brotundspiele@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 255d
When you're old enough to buy physical media, your eyes have gone bad enough that you don't need 4k 8-)
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 255d
Funnily enough, the main place I worry about resolution is on a desktop computer doing desktop computer stuff. My 1440p ultrawide is kind of decadent for games, but when I'm doing something I just want a bunch of real estate.
Just watching TV or movies...honestly I think I might like lower resolutions more. I've got a copy of Master and Commander on "fullscreen" DVD, 480p 4:3. I'd really like it to be 16:9 but I can't come up with complaints about the video quality. I get immersed in that movie just fine at DVD quality. I've got a few films on Blu-Ray, and at 1080p film grain starts being noticeable. And the graininess of the shot changes from scene to scene as the film crew had to use different film stock and camera settings for different lighting conditions, so I spend the whole movie going "That scene looks pretty good, oh that's grainy as hell, now it's better." Lower resolutions and/or bitrates smooth that out, but I think they actively preserve it on Blu-Ray because the data fits on the disc, there's no internet pipe to push it down, and film grain is "authentic."
So at 4k, it's either going to display a level of detail that I'm sitting too far from the screen to notice, it's going to look even noisier, or it'll be smeared by compression rather than resolution because of bitrate limitations. So...?
kossa@feddit.org · 5 pts · 255d
Theme Park came on 8 floppies, was my first game.
otp@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 255d
If Rollercoaster Tycoon was more of a tycoon/business game...
I try to play it on occasion out of nostalgia, but it has so much jank! Haha
Bluewing@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 255d
Ahhh yes. Sitting there drinking tea and flippin' floppies for half an hour or even longer. And there was always that one that would read well.
random_character_a@lemmy.world · 10 pts · 256d
Sorry, been busy
Stuff to do.
xxce2AAb@feddit.dk · 10 pts · 256d
"D-drive letters," gasped out the Linux crowd between peals of riotous laughter.
circuitfarmer@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 256d
user1234@lemmynsfw.com · 9 pts · 256d
/dev/fd0
SlartyBartFast@sh.itjust.works · 9 pts · 255d
My disk was a floppy until you walked by. Now it's solid state.
BilSabab@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 256d
i still kinda like the big floppy design. It just looks like it means business.
rcbrk@lemmy.ml · 2 pts · 255d
BilSabab@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 255d
THIS IS THE SHIT! GIMME A HELL YEAH! THE FUTURE IS HERRE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
phoenixz@lemmy.ca · 8 pts · 255d
Drive letters?
umbraroze@slrpnk.net · 1 pts · 255d
Yeah, I always thought the drive letters weren't a very elegant solution to the problem. Can have only 26 devices. Should just use numbers. You can fit 256 devices in one-byte integer identifier! Like how tape drive is 1 and printer is 4 and floppy drives are 8, 9 and so on.
::: spoiler spoiler Commodore 64 peripherals :::
InFerNo@lemmy.ml · 1 pts · 255d
In windows you can mount drives as folders to get around this
Onsotumenh@discuss.tchncs.de · 1 pts · 255d
OMV (NAS OS based on Debian) assigns each drive a UUID and mounts them under that. It takes a bit time to get used to, but already paid off when I had to shuffle around drives and cards cause of an upgrade.
s@piefed.world · 8 pts · 256d
I only use the PRNDL letters to drive
cosmicrookie@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 256d
💾
thethunderwolf@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 5 pts · 256d
that's the save icon
was A: reserved for save icons?? makes no sense
jaschen306@sh.itjust.works · 5 pts · 256d
I still have my tape drive.
Bluewing@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 255d
I'm glad my punch tape drive is long gone. We used a paper punch tape reel to reel on a garden cart to wheel around the shop floor to load CNC programs onto CNC mills. Often with hand written gcode. Gods, I hated that thing. Floppies were far faster and far more reliable.
jaschen306@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 255d
My dad had a punch tape and I remember he hated the shit out of that thing.
Bluewing@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 253d
I would rather stand a type an entire program into mill or lathe by hand than ever go back to something like that.
jaschen306@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 253d
Dad?
mesamunefire@piefed.social · 5 pts · 256d
I always found it strange how windows treated drives. Who decided an alphabetical letter should be another mounted system? And also shares having the same naming. So strange...
rumschlumpel@feddit.org · 5 pts · 256d
Feels like an eternity that I last used single-letter drive names ...
samus12345@sh.itjust.works · 4 pts · 256d
..."A long time."
ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 255d
I set my memory card reader to the letter A, but I also have my old Lightscribe DVD drive (and looking for one optical drive for my ThinkPad), and have a few floppy drives put away for potential hobby projects.
Zorsith@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 3 pts · 256d
Windows storage guide, from A to ZZ
HappySkullsplitter@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 255d
Bluewing@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 255d
I think I still have a few 3 1/2" and even 5 1/4" around here somewhere. I even had a 120mb Superdisk drive. I bought it used and got 4 or 5 years of use from it. It could hold 1000's of CNC programs and even CAD drawings.
***Great Googlely Moogely! You can still get Super disks on eBay!
itisileclerk@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 255d
I had A: and B: back in the days.