For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?

http://superuser.com/questions/231273/for-what-are-the-windows-a-and-b-drives-used

by fakelvis • 16 years ago

415 271 16 years ago

$Preview of For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?$ superuser.com

codeup• 16 years ago

Knowing the answer and feeling somewhat nostalgic about it makes me feel old!

mootothemax2• 16 years ago

and feeling somewhat nostalgic about it

And then remembering taking forever to save anything on a school computer, only for the floppy to read half the file and die when I got home. It's amazing - maybe it was the crappy quality of floppies I was using, or maybe I was using them for too long, but for me, regularly not being able to read data back off a floppy was a fact of life. Times have definitely changed for the better :)

danielh• 16 years ago

Norton Disk Doctor to the rescue! Even if it couldn't save the data, you could reuse the floppy. They were expensive at the time.

Out of curiosity, I just googled for prices and it seems prices stayed about the same since I bought the last pack.

gawker• 16 years ago

You can say that again. Reminds me of having to reinstall Windows 95 and swapping out 13-ish floppy disks. The good old days!

giu• 16 years ago

This question makes me feel old. And I'm in my early twenties.

redthrowaway9• 16 years ago

Me too. My first thought at seeing that question was, "I am too young to feel this old."

saint-loup• 16 years ago

My thoughts exactly.

DanI-S• 16 years ago

The singularity is coming!

leppie• 16 years ago

Me too :\

rbanffy9• 16 years ago

I started in computing with an Apple II+ (not really - my II+ was only the first to have floppies). I always wondered why those poor CP/M (and MSX) users had to put up with such nonsense as drive letters ;-)

trezor2• 16 years ago

I started out with an Amiga before moving to the PC. The Amiga (while still dealing with device-roots) at least had a more flexible system.

fd0: was floppy 1. If you had an additional drive, that would be fd1: etc. The best part was that you could also access devices by file-system label, so if you needed to make sure you were accessing not only a floppy, but the device labelled "WorkbenchExtras" you would simply do WorkbenchExtras:

Needless to say, this made multi-disk tasks & scripting rather pleasant, easy and cut out lots of boilerplate and checking.

It was a nice system and I kinda miss it.

Edit: df0: was floppy 1. dh0: was first harddrive, etc. Not that in changes much.

camiller3• 16 years ago

IIRC on the Apple the floppies were normally S6D1 and S6D2 (if you had two), unless you installed your floppy controller card in a slot other than Slot 6, which was the norm.

Natsu2• 16 years ago

Same here and I'm not much older than you.

Worse, my current computer has an A:\ drive. I don't know why I keep a 3.5" floppy drive around, exactly, because I haven't actually put a floppy in there in years, but I do have one.

And that's nothing compared to the 8088 that's collecting dust. It has two floppy drives, a 10 MB (yes, MB, not GB) hard drive, a CGA card & monitor, a math coprocessor and as much RAM as it can hold.

I don't know if it still works, though. It did work roughly a decade ago, which is the last time it was actually turned on.

Pity we got rid of the Apple ][ GS back in the 90s. It might be a collector's item by now.

ido2• 16 years ago

That's pretty high end for an 8088! Is it a PC or PC-XT?

rbanffy9• 16 years ago

> I haven't actually put a floppy in there in years

I have one computer (a Sun workstation) with a 3.5 drive that no longer works. The fun part is I cannot tell you in what year it broke.

kilian• 16 years ago

I'm in my early twenties, and this makes me feel old too. I have an 8088 too (which contains both an A and a B drive), I should fire it up again. Though mine has a Hercules graphics adaptor (everything is green!)

hums the california games chiptune

NickPollard• 16 years ago

One of my friends who teaches 11-16 year-olds recently had to explain to one of her classes what camera film was, and how it was used.

motters3• 16 years ago

The movement from camera film to digital cameras was a largely unnoticed revolution which took place within the last decade.

joezydeco• 16 years ago

I was in the same boat. My son found an old disposable camera in a drawer, and I couldn't find a decent way to explain it to him with out the WTF? look on his face.

Vivtek4• 16 years ago

Ha! I took a Hungarian class with my daughter a couple of years ago; I think she was 8, which is why she needed me to sit in with her, given it was a college class at IU. (I should explain that her mother is Hungarian, and so this was more in the way of language practice and grammar instruction, not that my daughter is a super-genius. Although, of course, she is.)

Anyway, one of the dialog exercises was to talk about hobbies, and one of the hobbies was record collections, with a picture. She had absolutely no idea what the picture was supposed to be, until I explained to her that they were like CDs. The other students in the class exploded with laughter.

ANH• 16 years ago

On a recent vacation I was photographing my nieces and nephew making funny faces. After the first shots they ran up behind me, looked at the back of the camera, and said, "Can I see?" They gave me bewildered looks when I told them it was a film camera and they'd have to wait a few weeks.

trop2• 16 years ago

I recently had to explain to a class of college students what a LaserDisc was. It turned out, luckily, that one of the students also knew...

mseebach• 16 years ago

One of my nieces was photographed by her grandmother with a film camera, and immediately ran to her, expecting to see the picture on the back of the camera. On learning that wasn't possible, she exclaimed "oh, it's not working".

iwh• 16 years ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2097732

rmc2• 16 years ago

Friend of mine was trying to fix an ancient computer that had a 5¼" floppy drive. He thought it was a slot loading CD drive. The CD is stuck in there now.

tmgrhm• 16 years ago

I'm 18 and could instantly answer the question. Not sure how to feel about this.

motters3• 16 years ago

It's a good illustration of how fast technology moves.

sidek• 16 years ago

I'm not yet done high school , and it makes me feel old too.

jacoblyles• 16 years ago

An accelerating rate of innovation will do that to you.

jaywalker• 16 years ago

Best comment: I never anticipated this day would ever come....

retube• 16 years ago

I remember having an Amstrad 640k. Two 5 1/4 floppy drives, no hard disk. Booting it up involved putting in about 5 disks one after the other and took about 20 minutes.

Ah those were the days.

rbanffy9• 16 years ago

5 disks? What were you running?

iwwr2• 16 years ago

I remember a time when you needed to carry 30 floppies to be able to copy C&C:Red Alert... and it was worth it.

mariani• 16 years ago

Same for when the demo of Quake came out, loved it.

bad_user3• 16 years ago

I remember playing Quake on a 486 at 66 MHz.

Performance was terrible, but this was real 3D with a cool atmosphere. My Quake came on a CD though ... which I loved because of the included Nine Inch Nails soundtrack.

Semiapies• 16 years ago

I just spent two nights pulling that ~10MB down from a BBS.

10 fps 3D action!

electromagnetic3• 16 years ago

I just used the CD trick when playing multiplayer. You start the game with the disc in one computer and then eject and run into the next room to start the game on that computer.

I think 9/10ths of the games I played with my brother were exploited with this trick until the warez scenes started developing proper and timely released nocd cracks.

LordLandon• 16 years ago

Why? Westwood were probably the only game company that understood this problem, and shipped their games on two CDs (allies and soviets), even if the content was mostly identical, and could all easily fit on one, just so that two people could play at once.

terrym• 16 years ago

Haha you just reminded me that we used to do this same trick for tribes 2 at a friend's house. We'd play online, too, so every time the map changed on the server, we'd have to run back and forth to load the new map.

igrekel• 16 years ago

Yep, and now it takes seconds to download for the iPad.

redthrowaway9• 16 years ago

Who else remembers using the square punch to put a hole in those 3 1/2" AOL disks to reformat them as HD?

chopsueyar• 16 years ago

They had something similair for 5 1/4" floppies to go from 360k to 720k.

Get off my lawn.

jefffoster• 16 years ago

My first stab at being an entrepreneur was buying normal 3.5" disks, stamping holes in them and selling them as pristine 3.5" HD disks. Let's just say it was less successful than I'd hoped.

zandorg2• 16 years ago

I did this on an Acorn Archimedes disk and though okay at first, the floppy got corrupted after a few days. Bad idea!

yardie• 16 years ago

My first stab at being an entrepreneur was buying up used floppies for pennies slapping a blank label on them and selling them for $1 a piece. But I was a pushover so most people could bargain me down to $2-3 for a pack of five.

patio112• 16 years ago

My aunt did one better: she used a scissors to reformat a 5.25" disk as a 3.5" one. (Lesson learned: be excessively cautious when giving instructions.)

steveklabnik• 16 years ago

... so you've been doing this your entire life, eh? Guess that's why you're good at explaining thing to the technically non-inclined.

dionidium• 16 years ago

OT: You are just the second person I've ever heard say "a scissors" (with an article). Is this a regional thing (like waiting "on line" vs. "in line")?

jasonkester• 16 years ago

Square hole punches cost money. Scissors are already lying around the house. Sure, the results weren't pretty, but then pretty was not the stated goal.

This was for 5 1/4" floppies, naturally. By the time 3 1/2" was the standard, I had a job and could simply requisition them as needed.

arethuza• 16 years ago

I remember getting a few funny looks from the stores in the Electrical Engineering department when I requisitioned a few (probably at least five) boxes of 3 1/2" floppies so I could install Linux (Slackware) complete with a pretty full X11 environment (I'm pretty sure X and its apps was split over at least 12 floppies).

This would have been late '93 or so.

julian372• 16 years ago

Yep, or vice versa, put a bit of tape over the hole to make disks writable that weren't intended to be. Good times!

iwwr2• 16 years ago

USB drives could use such a feature.

write-lock: prevent it from beint written (and acquiring viruses)

read-lock: prevent it from being read (and passing viruses), only showing the free space and being able to write only in the free space

marcinw• 16 years ago

We did this on VCR tapes too. Little electrical tap over the broken tab, and bam -- you've got re-writable media!

rbanffy9• 16 years ago

I used a soldering iron. The holes were round, but with a utility knife to cut the extra plastic, it looked very good.

Thanks, AOL!

ja27• 16 years ago

Remember punching single-sided 5 1/4" disks to make them double-sided?

madaxe2• 16 years ago

Yeah, and they worked really well.

camiller3• 16 years ago

Did that all the time for the Apple //e disks. Since most of the media at the time was for 360K disks for IBM compatibles but since the Apple format was 143K the vast majority of the time it worked.

In fact if I dug around in the box under my desk I could probably find the special puncher, and a couple unused ribbons for the old daisy wheel printer, etc.

Vivtek4• 16 years ago

I didn't have a punch. Scissors worked just as well.

jeza2• 16 years ago

By the time AOL launched in this country, they were giving away CDs which weren't good for anything but drink coasters. It seems they've long since departed as well.

othello• 16 years ago

This reminds me that even us twenty-somethings may one day be made every bit as clumsy and baffled by whatever comes up 30 years from now as our own proverbial mothers are today...

julian372• 16 years ago

Like this, linked from the article: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/12/12/

erikstarck• 16 years ago

Quite fascinating how some design decisions tend to stick due to technical or other reasons. We will probably still run Windows 2020 on the C-drive. Sometimes the reason is backwards compatiblity, other times it's something that requires a huge redesign of an entire system.

But, most of the time I think it's because people simply think that this is the way things are supposed to be. One example is how long it took before Auto-ISO became an option on DSLRs.

In all cases there are opportunities for a startup to be disruptive. So, keep looking for those C-drives!

jedsmith• 16 years ago

A massive pile of legacy Windows stuff probably assumes C: is the boot volume.

Windows has always had extensive backward compatibility, even if it requires tweaking to run 9x programs on XP and up. I often wonder how much better Windows could be if Microsoft were to choose to repeat OS X's innovation, which was almost completely severing backward compatibility.

brudgers3• 16 years ago

>"A massive pile of legacy Windows stuff probably assumes C: is the boot volume."

Seeing as Windows has been bootable from removable drives and over networks for a long time, I sincerely doubt it.

bhavin• 16 years ago

One might wonder why the first two letters are for floppy and not HDD. If you follow the drive letters, going from A to higher alphabets generally give you evolution of technology (ignoring network map Z:).

A: - floppy C:/D: - HDD E: - CD/DVD F: - External Storage

pwg• 16 years ago

Because MsDos, at least in its early versions, could not dynamically assign new drive letters to newly inserted disks. So the workaround, which is still with us years later in Windows 7, was to reserve at boot time the first two letters (A/B) for drives with removable media (i.e., floppy drives, there were no usb flash dongles in those days).

Qz• 16 years ago

I don't think that's true for Vista or Windows 7. I have B:\ as a Backup partition from my second HD on both.

dfox3• 16 years ago

And this was perfected in Windows 95 which always had drive A:\ visible in My Computer even on computers without actual floppy drive (in that case it was named "Removable drive", had generic removable drive icon and did nothing useful).

stuhacking• 16 years ago

Perhaps it's because the first IBM PC did not have an internal hard disk as standard?

lovskogen• 16 years ago

How long before a question like "My DVD wont play in this old computers DVD player?"?

flexd• 16 years ago

This makes me remember elementary school and saving stuff on floppies, and that i have Sango fighter on floppies in a drawer somewhere. They really do not make games as good as they were before!

JacobAldridge• 16 years ago

The past ain't what it used to be.

nevvermind• 16 years ago

There are too many "this makes me feel old" in here. And in SO, for that matter. You snob folks...

Maro2• 16 years ago

Why does that make us snobs?

rogerclark2• 16 years ago

because for this purpose, you are all using "old" for "more knowledgeable and superior"

benwerd• 16 years ago

Aw, man. I turned 32 on Friday, which is 224 in developer years, and have spent the last couple of days consoling myself that everything's fine, I'm not past it, etc etc. And now this. Thank you, Hacker News. Thank you so much. I am as old as dust and time and the fabric of the universe. Now I know how all those COBOL programmers felt.

funthree• 16 years ago

If its any consolation I am only 24 and felt a bit old as well knowing entirely what was coming after clicking the link.

Lets just say whoever posted the question is a newb :)

edd• 16 years ago

If its any consolation I am only 22 and felt a bit old as well knowing entirely what was coming after clicking the link.

redthrowaway9• 16 years ago

Obligatory:

http://thejokeshop.org/2008/12/as-useful-as-a-cobol-programm...

tel• 16 years ago

* It was actually eight thousand years later, not the year 2000. Technology had advanced to such a degree that everyone had virtual reality interfaces which allowed them to contact anyone else on the planet.*

This joke needs to be adjusted for the times. It should say 10 years not 8000.

pwelch• 16 years ago

http://abstrusegoose.com/323

The last line: "COBOL is forever" gets me every time. =)

erikpukinskis• 16 years ago

This thread had the opposite effect on me. I see all these "old folks" responses and think "now we get to see who the REAL rockstars are."

When we're talking about 100 core cell phones and Clojure, in many ways the teenagers and the old hands are on more equal footing. Then someone busts out "and then I reverse engineered the tape drive with an oscillascope" and I'm like.... "Respect."

I look forward to one day being the old hack who can say shit like that.

mindcrime• 16 years ago

I am as old as dust and time and the fabric of the universe. Now I know how all those COBOL programmers felt.

If it makes you feel any better, I'm 37, which is like 259 in developer years.

billybob• 16 years ago

Man, I didn't even START programming until I was 27, and my career is going great. You aren't old until you stop learning.

maxklein2• 16 years ago

In 20 years people won't understand CDs either, or why people would carry around plastic as big as 3 iPods to play 12 songs.

redthrowaway9• 16 years ago

In 20 years, people won't understand iPods, or why you would have to physically carry around data anyway.

maxklein2• 16 years ago

How would they play music when jogging or in the train then?

RodgerTheGreat2• 16 years ago

Physical limits are a major component of latency. Until we figure out a way to transmit information instantly with infinite bandwidth, local storage will always be a significant factor.

edit: And given trends in solid-state drives, local storage will be cheaper and more energy efficient than a wireless network for a long time.

forinti• 16 years ago

I must be a ancient, because I remember having to identify which side of the floppy I wanted to use!

On the BBC Micro, the first drive had sides 0 and 2; the second drive had sides 1 and 3. And I was lucky to have two drives. I only saw HDs on magazines.

jeffmould2• 16 years ago

How about having to notch the other side of a single sided floppy to make it double sided. Or even having to put tape over a notch to make it read-only. I remember those little black pieces of tape that came with a box of floppies to make the read-only.

ck2• 16 years ago

I finally threw away my Model II 8-inch floppies a few years ago.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Okona-GfhR-TRS-80.jpg

One day you'll have to take your kids to a museum to show them a CRT monitor (and they will have to take their kids to a museum to show them an incandescent light bulb).

Maro2• 16 years ago

I'm turning 30 in April and sometimes I feel like an old dog. Nevertheless, the article made my day, I can't stop laughing over it and the comments, esp. the Penny Arcade link in this thread. Cheers =)

skbohra123• 16 years ago

Never, this would happen again that one technology/company would have such huge effect.

RiderOfGiraffes2• 16 years ago

My first computer didn't have disk drives at all - it used standard audio cassette tapes in standard audio cassette machines. I remember feeding the audio into an oscilliscope and reverse engineering the format used on the tape, then writing Z80 machine code (I didn't have an assember - I wrote actual hex opcodes and fed them into a program I wrote that read hex and poked the values into memory) to create tapes that then overwrote the stack and booted me into a machine code monitor.

Then I wrote a Forth operating system.

This was on a 16KB machine (I had the expansion pack) with a 1.7MHz Z80.

Fun days. I still have the machine and its complete circuit diagram. I should get it out again, but then again, I don't have time:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2095231

rasur• 16 years ago

Sounds a bit like you had a Sinclair ZX80.

Been there, done that ;)

RiderOfGiraffes2• 16 years ago

TRS-80 Model I: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80

bad_user3• 16 years ago

I also had a home computer featuring a Z80 CPU, compatible with the Sinclair.

But this one also featured a 3.5" floppy drive: http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=...

Sadly I sold it to a friend at some point.

cubicle672• 16 years ago

A few years ago I went back to school for a bit. One day I was sitting with my classmates, average age about 18, discussing our first computers. I mentioned I got started on a Vic 20 with a tape drive. Suggested someone, "Was that so you could listen to music while you coded?". Took some effort to convince them I wasn't pulling their leg when I told them that it was used to save programmes to

anon_for_this_1• 16 years ago

Ahh the Vic 20. Warms my heart just hearing about it :) My parents bribed me to do some stuff when I was younger with the reward of a floppy disk drive. I was living like a boss when I got that drive!

jrosoff• 16 years ago

oh man! You had a tape drive for your vic 20? when i bought games they came as a book and i had to type the assembly instructions in for 3 hours if i wanted to play!

rapind2• 16 years ago

Vic20 here too. I think back like it was the golden years, but I vaguely recall some hanging during LOADING.

hasenj• 16 years ago

At around 1993 we used cassette tapes to save progress in the game "The Castle"[0] on MSX[1]

Actually I was too young to know what was going on; my dad setup the tape thing.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Castle_%28game%29

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX

regularfry4• 16 years ago

I had something similar (a later model, if I'm guessing right). The problem with mine was that the 3.5mm jack socket on the machine had a loose contact, so I had to apply pressure for the whole time things were loading off tape. If I let it slip even slightly, I wouldn't necessarily know about it until 5 or 10 minutes later when the damn thing finished loading and just didn't work.

fourspace• 16 years ago

Ah yes, saving data onto a cassette tape. My parents purchased an Atari 1200XL in the early 80s and when I was about five years old, I quickly hijacked it to play games and eventually learn how to write code. For the longest time I wondered what the cassette drive was for; why would you play music on your Atari? Then I realized, "Wait a minute! I can store data and turn the computer off?!"

My life was complete.

_b8r02• 16 years ago

Why the oscilliscope? No SAVE command? Why did you need to overwrite the stack?

juiceandjuice• 16 years ago

Analog oscilloscopes have a save feature, it's called a camera hooked up to the trigger output.

frooxie• 16 years ago

My first computer (an ABC80, with impressive 78 x 72 pixel b/w graphics!) didn't even have cassette tapes. I'd spend a few days writing a program, and then I'd have fun with it until I shut the computer off, at which point it was gone forever. Although for the best games I created, I used to transcribe the code by hand into booklets.

kellishaver• 16 years ago

We had a TI-99 with a tape drive-a standard tape player that you would set next to the Mic input on the computer, get the volume just right, and hit Play.

My dad and his friend used to send programs to each other late at night via HAM radio. One would hold the mic keyed next to the tape player playing back the ASCII and the other one would hold the speaker up to the computer's input and load the data.

This was in the early 80's. I think maybe they invented PACKET or something.

tintin• 16 years ago

Also a nice reminder to expect the unexpected in your work. I bet most programs back then trusted there was a disk in A. Now installers are relying on the existence of C. But what if you boot from USB? The '/' solution is a more elegant one in this case.

RyanMcGreal2• 16 years ago

> "Please Insert Disk 13" OH GOD WHERE IS DISK 13, I CAN'T FIND DISK 13. - Jeff 16 hours ago

I have exactly this memory as well.

My first computer was a Compaq Deskpro Portable. It had a 5.25" floppy drive and a 40 MB hard disk. It was an embarrassment of riches - how could you ever fill up 40 whole megabytes? Between that and my custom AUTOEXEC.BAT file, I was set.

As it happens, I still have most of the files I created on that original computer, and can even run my old BASIC programs using DOSBox on Ubuntu. I had to copy the files via 5.25" floppies to another computer that had a 5.25" and a 3.5" floppy drive; and from there on 3.5" floppies to yet another computer that had a 3.5" floppy drive and a CD drive.

ghostDancer2• 16 years ago

Well windows 1.0 were only [1] 5 5.25" floppies and [2] 2 for MS-DOS and another one for write (the grandfather of word). I think i need a drive to try them again ;-) .

[1] http://twitpic.com/39kbjz [2] http://twitpic.com/39kaxd

ikitat• 16 years ago

I recall Slackware Linux requiring 13 disks

javanix• 16 years ago

I found a set of Windows 3.1 disks at home back in high school once and actually managed to get them installed on my brand new gaming rig that I bought. I was unreasonably proud of that feat.

someisaac• 16 years ago

I still remember my dad installing windows 3.1 from a set of windows 3.1 disks. My job was to change the disks when it asks :)

dctoedt• 16 years ago

A couple of months ago, my siblings and I were cleaning out our parents' house. In the attic, I came across my original Compaq sewing-machine luggable. I'd given it to my dad when I upgraded to something newer. If memory serves, the Compaq came with two 5.25" floppy drives and 256K RAM. When I was using it myself, I upgraded to 640K RAM, swapped the B: drive for a 10-MB hard disk, and eventually swapped the A: drive for a 3.5" drive. I thought I was pretty cutting-edge (for a non-techie, that is).

I hauled the luggable down from the attic and plugged it in. The only things that worked were the fan and the power indicator light. I guess 25-plus years of San Antonio summers weren't exactly the best thing for the electronics. Off to Goodwill it went.

RyanMcGreal2• 16 years ago

Last time I fired mine up (a couple of years ago), it still booted. However, an alarming amount of smoke came out of the fan vent so I didn't keep it running for long.

ams6110• 16 years ago

What the heck is Goodwill going to do with it? They'll have to pay a disposal fee to get rid of the thing.

m0nastic• 16 years ago

When I was a kid, we used to go dumpster diving; looking for software, discarded hardware, information, whatever.

Once, I found a few 3.5" Microsoft Office disks (I think it was Office 4.0), and decided to try and complete the set.

I think it took me like three months of digging through garbage to get the full set of disks (it was something ridiculous like 30 disks).

dfox3• 16 years ago

And in case of installing Windows 3.11, this was even more hilarious because of the fact that installer did not want all the disks in order, but only first five or so and then proceeded to demand disks in essentially random order, and in some cases the numbering on disks themselves did not match installers idea. I vaguely remember that printer drivers that installer expected on disk 7 or 8 (depending on whenever you used "Standard install" or "Expert install") were actually on disk 9.

extension• 16 years ago

Goes to show how much we've come to embrace change in the last couple of decades. Software was coming on ~50 floppies before we ditched them for CDs. Nowadays, things never get that bad before a replacement is phased in.

BahUnfair• 16 years ago

Unreal Tournament 2004 got up to 5 CDs and Half Life 2 I'm sure had seven. Apart from that, I've never seen anything even approaching what you guys are saying about old windows OS installs.

hackermom• 16 years ago

This gave me a good laughter, and I'm only 30.

Steve0• 16 years ago

Makes you wonder, when will the floppy be discarded as the icon for 'save'?

wardrox• 16 years ago

Maybe when something comes along to replace "save"?

With the steadily increasing amount of software that auto-saves without you noticing, maybe soon we just wont need to "save" anything. It'll just happen.

bergie• 16 years ago

GNOME has been using a picture of a hard drive for quite a while now: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gnome-document-save.s...

Though that may also become antiquated with SSDs and cloud storage :-)

maguay2• 16 years ago

There's only a handful of apps on iOS that include a save button, and even of those that do include one, DocsToGo is the only one I can think of that uses a floppy for a save icon. It might be gone before you know it ... though I'd guess you'll still see it in Windows in 2020 or beyond ;)

brc• 16 years ago

My guess is never. The universal train icon for signs has a funnel and a cow-catcher, and it's a long time since a train looked anything like that.

Same goes for the universal sign for telephone - nothing like a modern cordless handset.

We can already seen this in action as the icon for 'mp3' on signs looks like a first-gen ipod. Already no players (even ipods) look like that, but I think it will stick around for a long time.

Some things get stuck as icons and the original meaning is lost with the sands of time. Once the icon is assigned to a meaning for most people, it sticks. There's no reason to update the icon, even if it no longer represents the object, because everyone agrees on the meaning.

michael_dorfman2• 16 years ago

I recently bought my 13-year-old daughter a laptop with 8 gig of RAM. When I was 13, I was lucky enough to get a computer with 8 kb of RAM (and one of the 8 went to the operating system, so there were 7167 bytes free.)

There aren't too many areas where one generation translates to a million-fold improvement.

madaxe2• 16 years ago

Your daughter had better be using that 8 gig for something useful. 8k should be enough for anybody!

michael_dorfman2• 16 years ago

Every now and then I regale her (and her sisters) with tales about life in the olden days, when if you wanted to change the channel on the TV, you had to get up and walk across the frickin' room!

Now excuse me, I need to chase some pesky kids off my lawn.

Luyt• 16 years ago

Let me guess, did you have a PET-2001?

sbt• 16 years ago

Now I just feel old

bane• 16 years ago

"Once upon a time ... technologies of the past." "Il était une fois... les technologies du passé."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdSHeKfZG7c

This video made me feel tremendously old.

bnastic• 16 years ago

SSD is the best upgrade we can do these days?

Kids don't know what it feels to upgrade from a C-64 with a "datasette" to an early Atari 520ST with 3.5" floppies. THAT was an upgrade, everything else pales in comparison.

el_chapitan• 16 years ago

This makes me remember when the first iMac came out (apparently in '98) and just broke my brain by not having a floppy drive.

http://www.businessweek.com/1998/36/b3594050.htm

motters3• 16 years ago

As far as I remember the A and B drives were used for floppy disks. In the olden days home computers didn't have hard drives, and typically either had a single or dual floppy drive. With a dual drive you could do fancy things like make backup copies, without having to repeatedly store data to RAM and swap source and destination floppies. In the 1980s home computers typically didn't have enough memory to store the entire contents of a floppy disk in RAM, which made the process of creating backups irksome if you didn't have a dual drive.

If you've only started using Windows based computers within the last five years then the missing A and B drives may seem mysterious. Floppy drives started disappearing from first laptops and then desktop machines in the early 2000s.

cmiles74• 16 years ago

I was working at an Apple reseller when the iMac came out. Part of our sales pitch was to try to convince everyone who bought an iMac that they needed a USB floppy drive to go with it. Everyone was convinced that people needed that floppy drive.

http://www.osnews.com/story/18/The_iMac_and_the_Floppy_Drive...

sp332• 16 years ago

Floppy disks were also used in home computers that had hard drives. Before it was popular to have local networks, and before the internet was commonplace, sneakernet was the best way to share files among computers. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Sneakernet

Unosolo• 16 years ago

Few people on superuser.com seem to mention that B:\ was always reserved even on a single floppy system so that it was possible to copy data from one floppy onto another:

1. Insert source disk

2. Type copy a:\. b:\

3. The system will read a chunk of data from a:\ then say: Please insert disk B: and press any key to continue...

4. You'd swap the disks, press a key, and the system will write the chunk of data and say Please insert disk A: and press any key to continue...

This would go on and on and on...

Anyone remembers installing Win95 and the number of 1.44MB 3.5" floppies it came on? 26! And once you got to about disk no. 13 it would start asking you to insert seemingly random disk numbers every minute or so... Or how about getting to disk number 17 and being told that the installation is corrupt, start over.... errrr.......

TimJYoung• 16 years ago

Re; Win95 - Yes, and I still have them somewhere in my attic. I even have the original Windows 95 beta floppies. :-)

Another one that was a doozie was VC++ for Windows 3.1 - it was about 13 or 14 3.5" floppies also.

jeza2• 16 years ago

> "I think it shows how obsolete these things have become that the 'new generation' have no experience of them :-) Makes me feel old – Andy Paton"

Yet we had to put up with this inferior technology for so long. I remember people were still running around with floppy disks at high school in the late 90s/early 00s (it was easily 20 year old technology by that time) and I started using the internet for transferring my files. So much that I have never purchased a USB memory device.

rick_2047• 16 years ago

Interesting. After the first few thoughts like "This can't be happening I am only 19" and "this guy is either dumb or 6" my next thought was "What would be the question that would make me feel really old when I am in my 50s"?

The effect this question has on people is because they remember some information which most of the users today don't know as they have never used that technology. So what technology of today will become so obsolete that you would remember your age?

antidaily• 16 years ago

Jeff Atwood tweeted this yesterday with the comment "want to feel old?"

raganwald2• 16 years ago

Floppies!? Kids these days. My High School had an actual, physical computer, a Data General minicomputer. We used teletypes that printed on a continuous roll of cheap paper.

The computer used removable media: 12" removable "Diablo" 5MB hard drive platters. One had four user basic on it, one had single user basic, and one was locked away with the software for grading students.

Memory management was primitive: BASIC ran in RAM, and if you used single user basic, you had 4x the RAM and therefore room for 4x the program. When swapping drives, you had to boot the computer by toggling the CPU's three instructions into the front panel.

I wrote a massive Star Trek adventure game in single user basic. Friends would actually creep into the lab overnight so they could play by themselves.

jdee• 16 years ago

Luxury! I used to have to snip endless chads out of punched cards to represent the very zeroes and ones of the program i was writing! Thanks to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1a1wHxTyo

JonnieCache2• 16 years ago

Go for the original: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eDaSvRO9xA

1948's finest.

osipov• 16 years ago

Back in my elementary school days we had to compute with an abacus!

raganwald2• 16 years ago

Before going to school, and thereafter in the summer, I do remember writing WATFIV and SNOBOL programs on punch cards, but I used a card punch machine to create them.

Vivtek4• 16 years ago

You had cards? We had to use a hammer and awl to punch the holes into vellum that we tanned ourselves.

thwarted• 16 years ago

You had zeros and ones? We only had ones, until one day someone discovered a zero when he accidentally subtracted two ones.

jmaygarden4• 16 years ago

I worked for a company in 2005 that was still maintaining Data General minicomputers for test-range radar tracking systems. The original "radar program" in Data General assembly has since been ported to C for new development, but those old systems are still ticking just fine.

cipango• 16 years ago

I'm guessing they didn't have you sign a NDA?

kschua• 16 years ago

I was really surprised to see this question asked. I had always assume it was a given that people knew that A: and B: were for floppies.

Just brings back memories of the days when I had one floppy drive. I had to load MS-DOS disk, then swap to my game disk.

Then when I had two floppy drives, I was jumping for joy. Now I don't need to swap disk.

The pain of installing MS Office 4.3 with a dozen floppy.

Ah ... the memories

Lazlo_Nibble• 16 years ago

We had a PDP-11/34a running RSTS/E v7.0-07. About 50/50 split between VT100s and printing terminals, plus one Tektronix and later on a few GiGis; storage was two washing machine-size RK07 drives (swappable 28Mb dual-platter cartridges the size of a small trashcan lid) and two RX02 8" floppy drives. We found some undocumented escape codes for the VT100s that let you play "music" on the keyboard by turning on keyclick and cranking up the autorepeat on insane levels. Someone bought DUNGEO (the original version of Zork) from DECUS too. Man that was fun.

I still have all my 8" floppies -- loads of BASIC programs, and a lot of content from the message-board system we wrote for it. You could enter posts using VT100 escape sequences to create animations. I figure there's a 50/50 chance the disks are still readable, since the bits are the size of small cats -- someday I'll find someone who can dump them for me.

mkramlich2• 16 years ago

I also wrote a Star Trek adventure game in BASIC. Must have been a rite of passage for kid programmers. :)

rman666• 16 years ago

My first personal computer was an Ohio Scientific C24P. I had to load BASIC into RAM using a 300 baud cassette tape. Beat that, ya youngsters!

maguay2• 16 years ago

I'm in my early twenties, and one of my earliest memories of computers was my Dad trying to get a book of stamps out of the floppy drive on his Amiga. Plus, who could forget installing Windows 95 from, what was it, 20 floppies? And now we buy 1Tb drives like it's nothing...

EGreg• 16 years ago

They used to be used for floppy disks and other such things! In fact they started in DOS. Ah, remember the days? I do... b because I'm 27.

Anyone here started programming with QBasic?

JonnieCache2• 16 years ago

>Anyone here started programming with QBasic?

Guilty. Did a fair bit of that.

Although I think before that I was hacking batch files featuring the CHOICE command and firing them from config.sys in order to build a menu to allow me to chose from among the many different DOS memory management setups needed to play various games. Ahhhh, Dune II.

Thank god those days are gone to be honest. I'd pretty glad I don't have to deal with IRQ numbers any more.

nollidge• 16 years ago

I ate QBasic for breakfast for a couple years. Rewrote SNAKE.BAS with SCREEN 13 graphics. Wrote a slot machine program based on the one in "Absolute Beginner's Guide to QBasic" (IIRC - Google is no help, but I remember it had a neon green cover with a safari adventure guy). Rewrote a loan amortization program that my dad had originally written in Wang BASIC (and even then he only had a printout).

I have a soft spot in my heart for QBasic. As DOS-based procedural languages go, it has of the best editing environments, fantastic integrated help, and hits that sweet spot of making simple things easy and hard things possible that never outgrew my learning curve. Contrary to popular opinion, I never had to "unlearn" anything once I graduated to modern languages.

edw519• 16 years ago

The possibilities are endless (27 second video)...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3O3HdjOfsI

jadedoto• 16 years ago

I miss going to class with a floppy and knowing it was corrupted, get an extension on the assignment. I am only 20... are there really computer users out there unfamiliar with floppies? I keep 5.25" drives around for fun and I still have Windows 95 on 3.25"ers :)

lesterbuck• 16 years ago

Where did floppy disks come from, Daddy?

I'm old enough to remember the 8" floppy disk that was invented by IBM to ... wait for it ... boot System 360! I think they had CE (customer engineer, i.e., repair guy) diagnostics, firmware, etc. on them, as the little bit I actually saw one being used, it was during maintenance.

snorkel• 16 years ago

Don't even get us old timers started on how we used to mount CD drives. Editing AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS and making sure the sound card driver loaded after so it wouldn't steal the same interrupt, and sometimes D:\ would appear to be there but you couldn't read it ... ah, my back hurts! Get off my lawn!

dfox3• 16 years ago

An writing another batchfile as to load MSCDEX only when you actually need to access CDROM as to preserve these precious 50kB of conventional memory :)

sedachv• 16 years ago

Do you remember those sound cards that came with their own IDE controller for CD drives?

runjake2• 16 years ago

The Timex-Sinclair 1000 was like my 3rd or 4th computer. End of contest (hopefully all the real PDP folks are long dead, right?).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Sinclair_1000

2K RAM, 3 MHZ CPU (much faster than the .9 MHZ of my TRS-80 Color Computer. Yes, it didn't even have 1 MHZ). And yes, I did a lot of programming on that keyboard.

cadr• 16 years ago

A VAX 11/750 was my 4th or so computer.

Of course, that was after an Apple II clone, and C64, and a 286. They were scrapping it and I (my high school, but really me) ended up with it. Can't remember if I ever got it working properly, but it was really impressive. It had been used in an NMR setup and had really neat vacuum tubes to do connect to that.

runjake2• 16 years ago

Scrapped doesn't count, if so I have some 1960s gear. I also have a bit of nostalgic fondness for VAX & VMS as I spent my early computing career working on it (along with the full range of DEC gear). I'd never want to go back, though.

run4yourlives• 16 years ago

I feel so old.

wallflower• 16 years ago

Also, not everyone was cool enough to have both A: and B:

And tape drives transfer speeds were 300? baud. Most people can read way faster and some can type faster.

I have many memories of working late in school labs, feeling that awful feeling when the sky outside gets light as it literally dawns on you you've been there all night, making backups on multiple floppy disks as you go...Bathed in the fluorescents

haberman• 16 years ago

When I was learning DOS on my dad's computer at work (IBM XT), I knew how to use the "cd" command to change into a directory. Unfortunately I didn't know how to get back out of a directory ("cd \") so I would restart the computer whenever I needed to get back to the root directory.

Ah, those were the days.

wizardishungry• 16 years ago

I believe that I used to change drive letters to get around this but it may have eventually remembered the last directory when you changed back.

isomorph• 16 years ago

In the style of one of those YouTube comments, "I'm 19 and I have used a floppy disk!!"

nhebb2• 16 years ago

I just realized that I have a bunch of old 3.5" discs in my desk - even though I don't have a single system with a floppy drive anymore. I just cleared out a bunch of space in my hutch. Thanks HN!

marckremers• 16 years ago

The fact that Windows still keeps this hierarchy is what stuns me the most. Why are they still silently referring to this technology in 2011?! It just boggles my mind. It's almost like keeping your floppy disks in your top drawer even though you haven't used them for 15 years. And won't. Ever.

makeramen• 16 years ago

NUMBER MUNCHERS! i miss that game

jaspero• 16 years ago

3.5" HD Floppies were awesome compared to non-HD.

didip• 16 years ago

Back in the floppy days, archive tools matter because it can cut down the number of disks.

Cannot believe I still remember my old favorite: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARJ

Screw pkzip. It always asked me to insert the first disk, again, last.

rogerclark2• 16 years ago

This guy obviously wrote this question to provoke this exact response from people. He's duped all of you into obsessing over nostalgia and thinking/saying you've got a leg up on "today's youngsters."

Nobody who asks this question would need to go to a StackOverflow site to get it answered.

radioactive212• 16 years ago

Good times, I used to install windows 95 with 20 floppy disks!!!

radioactive212• 16 years ago

You know what actually amazes me these days. I once had to explain this exact same question to someone and they were very interested in the answer.

I remember back in the old days when I would bring up anything tech I got called a nerd and/or geek and it was the kind stuff you dont talk to normal people about.

I got made fun of by people for talking about IRC channels and being on internet boards, back when they were command line.

The weirdest change for me as been the acceptance of knowing about technology. Today if you dont know what the interent or a computer is you are consider old and out of date. Back then if you knew that stuff you were an outcast.

beej71• 16 years ago

It's the same reason there's no Channel 1 on TV.

mkramlich2• 16 years ago

That's one of those questions that makes a guy feel old. I also remember 8" floppy disks first-hand. I was a kid, but still.

elevenE• 16 years ago

I'm in my late teens. Makes me feel old too :)

jakemcgraw• 16 years ago

When I installed Windows 95, it was off of 14 floppy disks, feels good man.

pronik• 16 years ago

What scares me about this question is that such easy and popular questions (and answers to them) mean a lot of karma points to all of the participants before it goes into community wiki mode, while folks who actually can google their problems (and spend time actually working instead of reloading StackOverflow every five seconds) have low scores, since the questions they ask are complicated and thus rarely answered and even more rarely popular.

lostbit• 16 years ago

I still have my MSX Hotbit with a 5 1/4 floppy disk extension. I had a lot fun with it in the past. Now I'm wondering what to do with it... At this time, I guess kids will find interesting that a computer must be attached to the TV so you can have a screen. Some love the typewriter, which prints at the same time you type!

For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?

Related Stories