B is the real grandpa
My first PC is still in storage. It had
- A: 3.5 floppy
- B: 5.25 floppy
- C: HDD
- D: CD-RW
- E: ZIP drive
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.
I remember feeling cool when we got our ZIP 250 drive
This is the way
This is the way
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.
You burned floppy discs?
Copied. Burned. The terminology changed a lot and I got old.
On the lower density 5.25s, you can actually write the data by hand using a wood burning kit.
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.
…………. Fuck.
I 100% assumed the same thing. Lol
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.
It’s a code of honour at this point … no one uses A: in respect for all those drives that died for our sins
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.
If she’s in the US several MVMOs have unlimited talk and text for like $10 a month
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.
Oh thumb drive to virtual floppy sounds like when I had to work on old cnc machines that had a few modern upgrades
Don’t worry about it. That rule hasn’t been relevant in a long time since we no longer use floppy disks
My PC still has a floppy disc drive
Hipster?
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.
Even 11 years old, unless its an industrial computer… how does it have FDD connector?
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 😂
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…
I keep my storage hard drive assigned to B so the optical drive is still D.
You monster.
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.
Make it G: violate unspoken rules.
If you have never assigned a drive to F: or G:, how can you even say you lived?
not me with my
/dev/sda
/dev/sdA
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.
Yeah and if you put a second one it’s B:. At least on my slowly dying 7 machine.
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!
To be fair, you occasionally need to “hack” Linux a bit to get modern stuff working, too
If you’re not setting emojis as your drive letters, you’re living in the past.
Incidentally, don’t open the 😳: drive
😈
🦫🐈🐇🦇🦋🌮🦪
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)Fav drive
Brrrrr ck
Cachk-cachk
Nrrrrrrrrrr
Yeah i can hear that drive letter 35 years after the fact
B:entered the chatDudes with a
B:were 1337and/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.
There was also a period where you needed 3.5 AND 5.25 drives to use off the shelf software.
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.
Yeah, that’s around where I came in. Although I did have an old 386 with two 5.25” drives and no hard drive.
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
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.
B: entered before the pins 0xA-0xF twist.
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.Of course I know him, he’s me!
/dev/sda1
I think the equivalent would be /dev/fd0 or something like that
I just realized I had forgotten about drive letters altogether.
Drive letters?
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
In windows you can mount drives as folders to get around this
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.
My disk was a floppy until you walked by. Now it’s solid state.
Sorry, been busy
Stuff to do.
Drive letters are one of the few things I miss about windows now that I’m on linux.
Yeah, but /mnt/ has its upsides!
/mnt/a
/mnt/win
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.
My drives live in my home directory lol
Literally does not matter. You can mount them right on your desktop if you want.
Drives letters are a pain in the ass. Especially when working with network drives.
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.
I named the drives of a friend who migrated C, D and E so his head doesn’t explode.
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.
