cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/62743547
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.
But they were, all of them, deceived, for another drive was made.
And the CD-ROM drive was D:
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!
For once the question was actually dumb. Kids these days don’t know about the dual-floppy setup that ruled the world until hard drives became affordable.
How it is dumb? There’s no reason for anyone who wasn’t alive then to know about A and B drives.
That’s not “dumb”, it’s “not knowing a thing” and I’m sure you do it too.
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.
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.
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 always label my secondary and tertiary drive A and B these days
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.
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.”
Fun fact: that’s why we call them icons.
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.
“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
Praise the omnisiah
Windows people are starting to name their ssd a: and b:
It’s horrible
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 🤣
The old ways are being forgotten. The oral history of the gray beards.
Eh, that sounds like a fun idea to me. I think it’d be nostalgic. I’m gonna look into that, actually :)
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
It’s a Windows convention, but, if you are old enough, it was a DOS convention and a CP/M convention.
