cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/62743547
We still pay homage to the old gods with the “save” icon
“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.”
‘Dances with ribbons of mainframe tape’
Rise ye old ones RISE
Windows people are starting to name their ssd a: and b:
It’s horrible
i think even usb floppies show up as a:, don’t they? i’ve not used windows for a decade now, thankfully.
You didn’t mention Arch. You’re not an Ubuntu user are you?
i’m a unix omnivore
I remember A: being a floppy drive, but I never thought of hard being the opposite of floppy, lol
I experienced a time period where 3.5" discs coexisted with harddrives, but I’ve never seen a system where B: is actually used…
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.
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.
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’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
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?”
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
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.
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.
/dev/sdayet another reason Linux is bett’a
