• Mulligrubs@lemmy.worldEnglish
    181·
    4 hours ago

    And before A: and B:, we had cassette tape decks for our Commodores!

    It took 40 minutes to load a program.

    You don’t know what a cassette or a Commodore is, do you? Damn kids, get off my lawn

    • ouRKaoS@lemmy.todayEnglish
      1·
      2 hours ago

      I had a cassette drive for my CoCo3 from RadioShack.

      I spent a weekend typing in code in BASIC from a magazine to play a shitty pacman clone, tried to save it to the tape, and forgot the first few inches on a new cassette aren’t magnetic and can’t save anything…

      • BloodBlight@lemmy.zipEnglish
        1·
        58 minutes ago

        But have you seen Sonic the Hedgehog run at 60 FPS on a C64 though the magic of the REU’s DMA? PRAISE BE THE FORGOTTEN!

      • AppleTea@lemmy.zipEnglish
        2·
        1 hour ago

        I think a lot of people who know what a cassette is would be surprised by one that holds computer files.

        • jollyrogue@lemmy.mlEnglish
          1·
          2 hours ago

          NVMe drives can be partitioned by the hardware.

          There could be multiple drives on a drive and n# is the hardware partition.

            • jollyrogue@lemmy.mlEnglish
              1·
              28 minutes ago

              That’s the name of it. 🙂 I was letting a dog outside and couldn’t remember the technical name.

              Under-provisioning the drive is the most common usage I’ve seen.

              Maybe passing it directly to a VM, but I haven’t tried that.

      • kunaltyagi@programming.devEnglish
        5·
        6 hours ago

        Simply lovely. There long names are for mounting since they are persistent w ross reboots.

        The short ones can change of there are no mounting options or more or fewer devices than before.

        PS: even the networking devices have this funky naming

    • TipRing@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      5 hours ago

      No no, the real question is why CR LF instead of LF or CR? Why two characters for a line break motherfuckers?

      • Tweet@feddit.ukEnglish
        6·
        2 hours ago

        Because Teleprinters! Carriage return goes back to the start of the line, line feed goes to the next line. If you wanted “bold” on a teleprinter you just did a CR without the LF and printed the same text over the top again.

    • AnyOldName3@lemmy.worldEnglish
      19·
      10 hours ago

      When they added directories to DOS, they decided that the colons used as a separator on the DEC system they were basing it on were silly, and the forward slashes used by Unix were nicer. Forward slashes were already the character used to identify something as a command line option rather than a filename on DOS, though, because the world hadn’t settled on Unix’s dash convention yet, and lots of existing software just checked whether an argument contained forward slashes to decide whether or not it was a filename. That software would break if paths could contain forward slashes. However, there was a tempting character on the keyboard originally used to type ∨ and ∧ before unicode that was also a slash, so they used that.

    • glibg10b@lemmy.zipEnglish
      41·
      12 hours ago

      Because forward slashes are used in English

      I wonder if it’s legal to have a forward slash in a filename on Windows?

  • Savarosa@lemmy.worldEnglish
    15·
    14 hours ago

    D: was usually a cd drive, and E: was the second cd but this time it wrote those disks.
    Then later E became D, and died such…

    • Hupf@feddit.orgEnglish
      5·
      10 hours ago

      And when you installed a game using one CD drive but dared to want to play it from the other the next day because the first was busy…

    • Laser@feddit.orgEnglish
      12·
      13 hours ago

      Anything after C:\ was basically as you wanted, no? It might have been an optical drive, it might have been a second HDD.

      • Schemen110676@lemmy.mlEnglish
        4·
        7 hours ago

        Even C could be what you wanted.

        But since you needed A and often had B because of two different disk sizes C was the first open slot.

        In theory you could mix and match but a lot of software didnt work with that and it was better to stick to this informal convention

      • Savarosa@lemmy.worldEnglish
        8·
        12 hours ago

        Second HDD!? What for? Did you ran out of your 36MB? *

        *36mb was my first drive I can remember clearly - when we got it we thought we would never run out of space. Obviously HDDs didn’t start at 36 - not even at 16.

  • ddh@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    79·
    19 hours ago

    Actually it’s because C: is a happy drive and wants to show it. D: is less positive about things.

  • lonefighter@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    37·
    18 hours ago

    When I was a wee child we had a box of floppy disks for my first computer. They were all the colors of the rainbow, 5 for each color, and my little neurodivergent self got so much satisfaction sorting them to be in order of the color wheel (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, etc) and I also loved carefully using them as a fidget toy by flipping the little metal piece that covered the disk itself back and forth repeatedly.

    I really miss floppy disks for some dumb reason. I wish they’d bring them back with the same type of technology that is used in micro SD cards, solely for the nostalgia factor.

    • Hueristic_Autistic@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      12 hours ago

      I used to love sorting my dad’s rolodex of floppy a disks. He had the 5" floppy b’s and he kept those, “for memories” because no one used them anymore at the time.

      He had like 4 floppy rolodex cases.

  • Bipauler@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    18·
    20 hours ago

    Wouldn’t careful alignment be 5.25, and the click be 3.5? Or am I way off here? 5.25 are the big black actual floppy discs right? And then 3.5 or the smaller encased in harder shelled plastic with the little snappy metal sliding piece?

    Also, what is going up with the letter p in this screenshot?:

    • Zorque@lemmy.worldEnglish
      21·
      17 hours ago

      It’s all the letters along that column. There’s a weird artifacting that bolds everything along that line.

    • CombatWombat@feddit.onlineEnglish
      14·
      19 hours ago

      I seem to remember a swinging arm that I would click in place after inserting a 5 and a quarter floppy. I do think the 3 and a half floppies ticked a little when you pushed them into the drive, but not nearly so much as clicking the arm in place for the larger ones.

      • Hueristic_Autistic@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        12 hours ago

        It would pop the ejection button into place when you put it in the drive ☺️ I mss that click. You just knew it was working.

      • osaerisxero@kbin.melroy.org
        5·
        19 hours ago

        It depended on the model i think. I remember having exactly 1 3.5 drive with the clicky arm, but all the others did the tape deck thing.

    • ReptilianCleric@lemmy.zipEnglish
      6·
      19 hours ago

      Pretty sure the first floppies were 7", but there weren’t in use for very long. But, I would agree with your assessment regarding the two sizes most of us were familiar with.

      • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        15 hours ago

        8", not 7". Apparently, Strategic Air Command was using them to control nuclear weapon launch facilities until surprisingly recently (2019).

        • ReptilianCleric@lemmy.zipEnglish
          2·
          13 hours ago

          Thanks for the correction; admittedly, those were a little before my time, although I did see then once or twice in the wild.

          Speaking of storage technology that just won’t die, I think magnetic tape backups still exist in one form or another.

          • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
            7·
            12 hours ago

            Magnetic tape isn’t obsolete at all. Apparently these days they’re up to LTO-10, which can store 40TB per tape, and it’s also the cheapest storage medium per unit capacity (albeit with an extremely high initial cost for the drive itself). The only reason people forget about it is because it isn’t popular for home use.

  • Hueristic_Autistic@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    12 hours ago

    The 3.5 Floppy A’s… My school was underfunded and in 2008 we used floppy disks for our writing assignments. Other schools had flash drives and you weren’t allowed to use your own because they, “weren’t secure.”

    • Beangut@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      9 hours ago

      Mostly, the part where Microsoft said children should not learn the ways of the old gods should be disregarded.

      Every child of the computer should endeavour to learn the old magicks to an extent, many abstractions lay between us and it now but the further one progresses in their studies, the more they will find the old to be a beacon and anchor guiding to them to the rightful truth they require.

    • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
      49·
      15 hours ago

      All of it except the part where it implies people immediately abandoned floppies when hard drives showed up. They coexisted for quite a while, and computers would often have one hard drive and one floppy drive (so A:\ and C:\ without B:\).

        • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          35 minutes ago

          And LS-120 drives, which were so much the second coming of floppies that they could also read regular 3.5" floppies while making an alarming screeching noise the entire time to sweeten the deal.

          …I still have three of them someplace. I definitely have a box of LS-120 disks somewhere, too.

    • Verqix@lemmy.worldEnglish
      14·
      14 hours ago

      “The children must not be shown the old gods” This is true only in the most direct way. There is the effigy known as the save icon, which is in very widespread use. Sometimes this leads to questions of “why does it look like that?” and answers of “clouds used to be plastic rectangles with a metal clicky frame you slotted into the big off-white box”.

    • Dicska@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      12 hours ago

      Others have answered everything, but just to confirm it: when I started secondary school they still had a room full of computers that didn’t have a hard drive. They all worked off of floppy disks. During classes all of them went zugg-zugg-zugg-tsk-tsk.

    • prettybunnys@piefed.socialEnglish
      11·
      15 hours ago

      Yes, a and b were floppy drives and are “reserved” insomuch as C:\ is the default for compatibility reasons.

      A and B were floppy

        • prettybunnys@piefed.socialEnglish
          1·
          9 hours ago

          Zip drives, zif drives.

          These helped drive compact flash storage.

          Nintendo had it right all along with cartridges … just they didn’t have the capacity of optical media.

        • SavinDWhales@lemmy.worldEnglish
          5·
          13 hours ago

          Yes, but they got the letter Z, obviously. For the makers spoke: I created Windows 95 and I will give you the power to map your drive letters. But behold! Thou shake only map removable drives and let the hard drives be, for these are still assigned the old way by the old system.

        • RobertoOberto@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          7·
          15 hours ago

          There was a brief window of time where CD burners were new and beyond my financial reach, and so were new Zip drives, but companies were dumping Zip drives for rewritable CDs. I managed to score a free external Zip drive that was going to be trashed, and it was a godsend of an upgrade from 3.5" floppies.

          Until I got a second-hand CD-RW drive, then I dumped it too.

          • Hueristic_Autistic@lemmy.worldEnglish
            3·
            12 hours ago

            That’s where we got half our electronics from, the good ol’ corporate recycle bin.

            I had a windows 98SE laptop as a kid with a full power dock and a tiny bubble jet printer.

        • Hueristic_Autistic@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          12 hours ago

          My dad thought they were gonna be the fucking future and was trying to get everyone in the house to use it and my mom knew about the fact they can die and that she’d rather use disks.

          I liked it, it sucked when my first ever back up of all my files from the family computer was no longer accessible due to the red light of death.

      • Hudell@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        1·
        9 hours ago

        What I never understood was why eventually the B letter stopped being used even on machines that had two floppy disk drives. I remember very clearly using the second floppy on E:, F: and sometimes even D:, but I’ve never seen it being used as B:.

        Was it reserved to some kind of swapping system that later became irrelevant with hard disks?

        • bstix@feddit.dkEnglish
          2·
          8 hours ago

          I think the convention was to put the fixed internal drives first because they were more unlikely to change, and then use the later letters for external swappable drives.

          In the time when the B: drive was relevant a lot of software might have had hard coded the letters, so it made sense to avoid it to preserve the compability with legacy software as more drives were added.