• m3t00🌎🇺🇦@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    16 hours ago

    A: B: were for dual floppy drives. per dos manual. and fuck off with back slashes. forward slash is fs root / drives are devices under /dev.

      • m3t00🌎🇺🇦@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        15 hours ago
        1. i was hacking config.sys and autoexec.bat to optimize memory for games. after enough lock-ups, i dove into linux. just deleted my last unused windows partition. cost me a hundred dollars 20 years ago.
  • NigelFrobisher@aussie.zoneEnglish
    2·
    13 hours ago

    I want to know at what point people started saying the clunkier “hard disk drive” instead of just “hard drive”, because it definitely happened.

  • Jiral@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    17 hours ago

    / did not care but it was the way of the penguin, the child of the even older gods of ix.

  • Absurdly Stupid @lemmy.worldEnglish
    331·
    2 days 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
      5·
      2 days 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
        2·
        2 days 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
        5·
        2 days 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
          6·
          2 days 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
              4·
              2 days 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.

            • bertlewirth@lemy.lolEnglish
              1·
              1 day ago

              Well, for example, you need multiple partitions on a system drive. Such as swap, boot and the main partition for the OS

              • jj4211@lemmy.worldEnglish
                1·
                17 hours ago

                The namespaces are generally not used for that, since partition table does the job.

                Nvme bakes in a lot of “just in case” functions that fancy storage engineers imagine a use case for that are in practice superfluous.

      • kunaltyagi@programming.devEnglish
        6·
        2 days 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

  • mojofrododojo@lemmy.worldEnglish
    51·
    2 days ago

    I remember seeing my first pc with two 5.25" drives. the luxury! you could have two entire data sets accessible, you could jump from one program to another without changing disks…

    then a few years later I got a 20mb hdd, and copied almost everything I owned to it - and still had 3 mb free. a: and b: were nice, but boy wow this hard drive thing was mindblowing

    • Echo Dot@feddit.ukEnglish
      2·
      1 day ago

      And here’s me with my one terabyte drive and it’s nearly full. Of what I really couldn’t say, I don’t feel like I have all that much saved on here, but apparently it takes up a whole terabyte.

      • mojofrododojo@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        13 hours ago

        it’s ok, you can admit it, it’s fulla goat porn.

        hot, steamy, bleaty goat porn. hooves and horns everywhere.

      • blockheadjt@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        6·
        1 day ago

        “Ha! C used to be the first letter. Then a famous Roman emperor added A and B at the beginning because typing was too hard without them.”

        “They had computers back then?”

        “Oh no, they used typewriters. But none of the oldest typewriters survived because they were made from Ea Nasir’s inferior copper.”

  • ddh@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    92·
    2 days 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
    40·
    2 days 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·
      2 days 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.

    • AnyOldName3@lemmy.worldEnglish
      23·
      2 days 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.

    • TipRing@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9·
      2 days 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
        12·
        2 days 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.

    • glibg10b@lemmy.zipEnglish
      41·
      2 days 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
    16·
    2 days 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…

    • Laser@feddit.orgEnglish
      14·
      2 days 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
        5·
        2 days 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

        • JcbAzPx@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          16 hours ago

          Made it really awkward when your “data only” D: drive died and you suddenly find out the windows installer decided to put the boot sector there.

          No, of course you can’t just reinstall the OS, there’s an irreplaceable license tied to it. If we can’t get it working, the company dies. Good luck.

      • Savarosa@lemmy.worldEnglish
        8·
        2 days 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.

    • __Lost__@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      D: E: etc just get assigned as you added drives. D: was usually the CD drive because usually people only had 1 hard drive. I had 3 at one point and my CD drive was F:

    • Hupf@feddit.orgEnglish
      5·
      2 days 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…

  • Bipauler@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    19·
    2 days 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
      22·
      2 days ago

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

    • CombatWombat@feddit.onlineEnglish
      14·
      2 days 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·
        2 days 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·
        2 days 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·
      2 days 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·
        2 days 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·
          2 days 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
            8·
            2 days 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.