What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for?

http://superuser.com/questions/231273/what-are-the-windows-a-and-b-drives-used-for/231278

by kamaal • 13 years ago

118 140 13 years ago

Jugurtha• 13 years ago

Awww, that is an adorable question :)

I think in DefCon 18, Gordon "Fyodor" Lyon was talking about using Lua in Nmap. He said that the description mentioned that all of it and the doc could fit in a floppy disk.. And then he said "For the younger audience, a floppy disk is.." at which point the audience exploded in laughter.

I'm 26 now, but my oldest brother is 18 years older than me and almost all of us in the family are engineers so I had different technologies around the house. (Not old enough to see "drum memory", though).

return0• 13 years ago

OMG, i'm getting too old.

etfb2• 13 years ago

I came here to say that. In fact, bugger it, I don't care about originality! I'm going to say it too!

Oh gods, I'm so old.

atonse• 13 years ago

Yikes, me too! Although the first realization was when I heard Aerosmith on the oldies radio station.

einhverfr4• 13 years ago

You know when I saw punchcards first, they were already a somewhat bygone relic of ages past. But I used floppy disks for a long time. That someone would ask this question today, never having seen a computer with a floppy disk... Yeah I feel old....

IgorPartola2• 13 years ago

I am only 27! Why is this happening?!

ericcumbee• 13 years ago

glad it's not just me

glhaynes• 13 years ago

I think this was literally the first piece of "computer knowledge" I ever learned.

marcosdumay• 13 years ago

That means you missed all the fun with k7 tapes?

tshile• 13 years ago

That's exactly how I felt when reading the question :\

RexRollman• 13 years ago

I know how you feel. My ten year old daughter did not realize you could network computers together with a cable. To her, everything is networked wirelessly.

chrislomax• 13 years ago

When I was clearing out a cupboard the other day, my Son found an old cassette tape, he then proceeded to ask me what it was! I'm pretty sure in 20 more years we may see the same for CD ROMS or DVDs.

This particular post makes me feel so old though and I'm only 30 in a couple of weeks.

I remember buying Doom years ago and when I got the box it jangled round from all the discs inside of it.

I also remember when the first 24x speed CD drives came out, this is when hard drives were too expensive to load a full game on to so CD speed was important so your game didn't buffer as much.

Kids these days with their solid state iPads and 3D games consoles.

Blurgh

snorkel• 13 years ago

Don't copy that floppy, grandpa.

SeanDav• 13 years ago

A friend of my Father's was a mainframe guru, back in the day, and he told us about "cylinder" hard drives that would take several hours to power down because the torsional stress on them would get too high if slowed down too quickly. Also tape drives that were spinning so quickly they could be dangerous.

Sounds almost like heavy engineering!

adestefan2• 13 years ago

I remember the time someone thought they'd save money by buying cheap paper for the high speed IBM 6400 line printer. The print head moved so fast it just shredded the paper into a fine dust that caked in every internal part. It sucked cleaning that out.

btilly• 13 years ago

I am reminded of http://www.penzba.co.uk/GreybeardStories/TheBlackTeam.html.

pfarrell• 13 years ago

Some of the most brilliant people I've worked with are satisfied by the work, without needing lots of self-promotion.

"The Story of Mel" is both inspiring and humbling. A "real programmer"

http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/mel.html

carloc4• 13 years ago

Senility poll: Did you know the answer to this question?

carloc4• 13 years ago

Yes

carloc4• 13 years ago

tinco• 13 years ago

You do realize that other people can't see your poll result right?

StavrosK2• 13 years ago

Yes

StavrosK2• 13 years ago

thejosh• 13 years ago

Could also be that some people only used Macs or Linux or Unix or iPads.

dsr_• 13 years ago

I hope that's a joke. In case it isn't: IBM PC predates all of those except UNIX (and you wouldn't think much of the pre-1980 UNIXen); CP/M, which originated the standard, comes from 1973.

Zirro• 13 years ago

Partially. I am old enough to remember computers with one floppy drive (for old software, explaining the A:-position), but too young to have experienced the times when you needed two.

agildehaus• 13 years ago

I'm from the time when A: meant 3.25" and B: meant 5.25", but you certainly didn't need a B:.

gutsy6• 13 years ago

You never NEEDED two. All two did was make it easier to copy disks, and sometimes make it so you changed disks less often.

blumkvist• 13 years ago

Only knew about A:

dreen• 13 years ago

I did, made me feel old, and Im 25

pjmlp• 13 years ago

Yes. I am old enough to have seen DIY 8bit computer kits on hardware stores.

My first computer was a Timex 2068, using a tape recorder with counter!

The dream of every kid was to have a double deck tape recorder.

nilved• 13 years ago

Yes, because it's asked and posted here very often.

klackerz• 13 years ago

I am just 22 years old and I knew the answer. The first computer I used back in 98 came with floppy disks

mseepgood• 13 years ago

Seriously?

networked• 13 years ago

The drive letter B: is also used by BartPE [1] as the default for its RAM disk. In fact, I think every time but one I encountered a Windows-era PC that had a B: drive it was a RAM disk, not a floppy drive.

[1] A bootable live Windows XP/Server 2003 environment. See http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/.

mtrimpe• 13 years ago

A: and B: were more relevant when PCs didn't have hard drives. Back then usually the OS would be on A and your current game/app would be on B.

I still remember the first game that was soooo big it required both A and B, meaning you to take the OS boot disk out (which you of course always forgot to put back in after you were done.)

Good thing I had a dad who soldered Philips' Apple ][ clone together when I was 2 so that I don't feel that old for knowing this ;)

endgame2• 13 years ago

Bart's work is fantastic. I just submitted his MODBOOT page, which taught me far too much about bootdisks and .BAT programming.

Also its bootdrv.com is one of the smallest useful programs I've ever seen, clocking in at seven bytes.

adestefan2• 13 years ago

I had to go digging for a 3.5" drive a couple months back because I found some floppies that had some college papers on them. I have a zip disk with some artwork, too. At one point I had a SCSI zip drive and an Adaptec controller for it, but I have no idea where they're at now.

powertower• 13 years ago

Adaptec 2940 FTW!

rayiner3• 13 years ago

It's funny to talk about the 20 year old hackers who didn't ever have the experience of installing Word Perfect 5.x from 30-40 floppies, but let me tell you that those kids are going to feel just as old pretty soon. My daughter, who is about to turn one, is puzzled by why my Macbook Air doesn't do anything when she touches the screen. She doesn't recognize my dad's old Treo, which he gave her as a toy, as a phone, but will put a thin slab block up to her ear. We don't have cable at home, so she watches all her shows on Netflix and iTunes.

einhverfr4• 13 years ago

Dude, my copy of SCO Unix was only maybe 15 floppies....

chadillac83• 13 years ago

kerchunk!

brap brap brap eeee errrr eeeeeee errr brap brap aehhe aaaaeheh

insert disc 2/15

http://i.imgur.com/aIv6Y90.jpg

ck2• 13 years ago

OS2 came on 32 (thirty-two) 5.25" disks. I remember loading that beast.

300bps• 13 years ago

Novell Netware 2.15 came on 49 360k floppies. I remember generating individualized network clients based on the chipset of your network interface card with SHGEN-1 and SHGEN-2. To this day I have no idea why the last disk it asked for was SHGEN-2 and then it said, "Your shell is now on SHGEN-1."

unistdh• 13 years ago

Wow. What would happen if one of those floppies were damaged or unreadable? Would the whole process be a waste of time?

EldieTurner• 13 years ago

I remember installing Borland C++ with stacks of floppies, it felt like 50 but probably more like 30 or so. It took half a day.

mtdewcmu3• 13 years ago

But when you got it installed, finally, you felt like you earned it.

gutsy6• 13 years ago

Oh man, yea...I never installed anything with THAT many disks...I think the biggest one was 7 or 8 floppies...which took several hours.

I kinda miss those days. Sometimes.

nandhp• 13 years ago

Not everybody missed out -- I may not have done 40 floppies of WordPerfect, but I did install my first Debian (3.0 Woody) from a boot floppy, a root floppy, 4 driver floppies, and 20 base system floppies. http://www.debian.org/releases/woody/i386/ch-appendix.en.htm... http://archive.debian.org/debian/dists/woody/main/disks-i386... http://archive.debian.org/debian/dists/woody/main/disks-i386...

adamb0mb1• 13 years ago

Oh man. Same experience, different distro. Slackware was a bunch of disks too (but I don't remember exactly how many)

judk• 13 years ago

Sad that a 1 year old has "all her shows" to watch.

dwaltrip• 13 years ago

[Non-valuable contribution, removed]

Edit: I apologize for the rudeness of my comment. However, it is my understanding that the evidence available today points to things like TV being damaging to the development of the very young (1-3 years old)

ulfw• 13 years ago

That is sadly how parents raise their kids these days...

bdcravens• 13 years ago

lol I'm a 36 year old hacker who forgets quickly myself. After 4 iPhones, I used a Galaxy S3 for a few weeks. When I got the iPhone 5S, for several days I kept pushing the right lower side expecting a back action.

On my iPad mini, I keep trying to unlock it with my fingerprint.

mtdewcmu3• 13 years ago

I'm still on my first smartphone and it's an HTC Android phone. Using iphones and ipads that weren't mine, it took me a while to figure out that you can double-click the single button to get it to do something different. Trying to interact with it with only one pressable button kind of feels like having flippers instead of hands. I haven't quite grokked the one-button doctrine.

subb• 13 years ago

My uncle told me that two of its nephews play "phone" together by putting their whole hand flat against their ear instead of the usual thumb/pinky finger gesture...

gabemart• 13 years ago

I'm only in my mid 20s and I already feel totally left behind by the rise of mobile computing. Every experience I've had of the web on a mobile device has been incredibly frustrating. The idea of a phone or tablet as one's primary computing device makes me feel about 90 years old.

millerm• 13 years ago

Humorous image of thousands of floppies if you were to install windows 8.1 with that media: http://i.imgur.com/g0Zgf6q.jpg

iamben• 13 years ago

We're not very far away from "what is the blue 'Save' icon meant to be?" are we?

Kind of amazing really. Girlfriend's nephews are 6 and 9, pretty tech savvy (there's a lot in the house), but they had no idea what the slots in the front of their grandfather's computer were (and why should they?!).

adamlj• 13 years ago

The way things are going we will probably not have any Save buttons at all soon.

eru• 13 years ago

Google Docs doesn't have any.

bentcorner2• 13 years ago

Maybe for certain applications we're used to saving in, but unless there are revolutionary changes in computing I'm betting that you'll be able to save in notepad for a long time coming.

pekk• 13 years ago

It's used as Commit, and that will continue to be useful

sbt• 13 years ago

Oh man I am getting old :)

iv_08• 13 years ago

For the rugrats among us: http://imgur.com/bOdxEUW

ktzar• 13 years ago

Are we that old? :(

khill• 13 years ago

TIL I am old.

DanielBMarkham2• 13 years ago

I now officially christen this the "old guy thread of the day".

Back in my day, kid, we didn't have no stinking floppies for our PCs. All we had was cassette recorders, and we were happy to have 'em!

Reading this question took me down memory lane to doing a lot of PR#6. Couldn't remember if that command was for floppies or cassettes. Had to look it up. It was how we did I/O on the Apple II. As I remember, you changed the number (PR#3, PR#4, etc) based on the physical slot the peripheral was plugged into. This was back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and real men wore skirts.

CurtHagenlocher• 13 years ago

If I remember correctly, "PR#6" was basically just a command that executed the code at $c600. Each peripheral card had a 256-byte address space which was mapped into $cx00 where x was the slot number. Slot 6 was the standard slot for the disk controller -- it may even have been wired in, in later machines. So "PR#6" basically executed the firmware boot loader for the floppy drive.

DanielBMarkham2• 13 years ago

What I found weird was that I remembered the command, but not the technology it came from or exactly how I used it. So I'm Googling around trying to figure out when and why it was important. For some reason I remembered it as "Print #6".

Old age and forgetfulness is going to be really strange for a whole generation of computer nerds. So many different technologies, commands, and paradigms all jumbled up.

gutsy6• 13 years ago

See, my first computer was a Tandy 1000 and it just ran off of floppies and RAM. No hard drive. My mind was blown when we upgraded to a Windows 3.1 system that not only had a hard drive, but also a 3.5" floppy drive. WHOA, SMALLER DISKS.

amerika_blog• 13 years ago

If I could, I'd start everyone off "learning" about computers by using an Apple ][+. It is an open enough environment to learn just about everything, and a restricted enough environment to encourage efficiency and elegant design. After that, kick 'em upstairs to something modern with a Lisp compiler and you've got 'em for life.

afandian3• 13 years ago

I found this really sad. I don't consider myself old, but I suppose I'm going to have to start at some point. Maybe this is it.

bnegreve2• 13 years ago

And I've just noticed that the "save file" icon in word processors isn't a floppy disk as it used to be.

tanzam75• 13 years ago

And I've just noticed that the "save file" icon in word processors isn't a floppy disk as it used to be.

Maybe the one you're using. But the "Save" icon in the most popular word processor is a 3.5" floppy disk: http://i.imgur.com/WLFtT7A.png

This is the latest version -- Word 2013.

bnegreve2• 13 years ago

ahaha thanks :) I checked on LibreOffice and naively assumed that anything else would have a more modern icon set.

ceautery• 13 years ago

That's pretty fun. I'm glad the highest voted reply on superuser wasn't snarky about the answer. This sort of reminds me of the "Who the hell is Paul McCartney?" thing on Twitter recently... which is an order of magnitude more irritating than a kid who never saw a floppy drive.

raldi• 13 years ago

Also, even if you only had one physical floppy drive, it would still respond to A: and B:, albeit as split personalities. What I mean is that you could stick your programs disk in there and type A:EDITOR.EXE to run some editing program, and then go to save your document and type B:MYDOC.TXT as the filename, and DOS would know that you wanted to write this file to a different floppy, so it would day, "Insert disk for drive B and press enter", prompting you to swap the floppies. Then, when the editor program needed to access some of its files again, it would try to access, say, A:LIBRARY.OVL, and DOS would know that meant it was time to prompt the user to swap disks again.

danellis• 13 years ago

At that time (okay, a little later, but there was some overlap), I was using RISC OS. Its disk format allowed for each disk to have a name, which would be used in fully qualified filenames (e.g. ADFS::MyData.$.Docs.Resume). The OS could then ask for the disk by name (MyData).

D9u• 13 years ago

My first PC didn't have a C: drive.

It had two 5.25" diskettes to load the systems.

gutsy6• 13 years ago

Yup, me too. Put the DOS disk in start up the computer, then switch disks as you needed to to run programs. That was so fun!

Tichy• 13 years ago

I've used floppy disks and tape recorders, but I'm a bit embarrassed that I never used punch cards.

ytch• 13 years ago

It just like talking about programming on punch card to Generation Y

IgorPartola2• 13 years ago

In 2008 I got to play with an old oscilloscope/i486 hybrid beast with dual 5.25 inch floppy drives still in use at my physics lab. You could save the measurements to B while running the code off A. AFAIK it is still in use.

bane• 13 years ago

My first computer came with no drives, the tape drive was an optional accessory. Loading programs from tape instead of typing them into the basic was loads better. When I got my first PC I had a 3.5" (on B) and a 5.25" (on A) and a bunch of my friends kept coming over to have me copy their 5.25" disks to 3.5" disks and I was the cool kid on the block for a few months.

kabdib• 13 years ago

My first mass storage was a PhiDeck, a tape cassette drive that stored data digitally and that had motors to load and unload the heads and seek. It had a file system, of sorts, that fit in about 6K of RAM. Effective data rate was about 9600 bits/second, and it usually took 20-30 seconds to launch a program.

Primitive and slow as it was, it was still a vast improvement over audio cassettes.

Later, I wrote a software UART and interfaced my Z-80 system to a single Atari 810 disk drive. 96K of storage and tons faster. I got a lot of work done on that system.

lttlrck• 13 years ago

One of my favorites memories is my dad trying to copy a BBC Model B compact audio cassette without a cable ... speaker to microphone! He started it and crept out the room quietly closing the door behind him. It did not work.

smartaleckkill• 13 years ago

I recall recording software onto audio tape from radio broadcasts, I think it was a regular BBC radio show. (If anyone remembers I'd love a reminder of the details.)

wazoox• 13 years ago

I had a Toshiba laptop once that came without any software floppies; instead at first boot you had to generate the installation floppies for windows 95 and MS Office. If I recall correctly it asked for something like 80 floppies. Nightmare.

anilmujagic• 13 years ago

I remember zipping the game on cca. 30 floppies at friend's place, then going home and trying to unzip. Of course 27th or so would be corrupted. Sometimes it took me 3-4 round trips to friend's place and back, to get the game transferred :)

BTW, does anyone remember having to enter no. of cylinders in BIOS to make the HDD work :)

thinkersilver• 13 years ago

I remember laughing at my instructor when he mentioned carrying a box of punch cards. Boy do I feel like the old timer now.

colomon• 13 years ago

I spent a good bit of the summer of '89 writing C code to drive a tape punch for programming CNC machines.

Stratoscope• 13 years ago

When I got my first IBM PC in early 1982, IBM only offered single sided single density floppy drives with 160KB each.

But double sided drives were already available on the market. The only problem was that the PC BIOS and DOS didn't support the second side.

So I bought a PC with no floppy drives and picked up a couple of double sided drives at a local distributor for $300 each.

As I'd hoped, they worked fine as single sided drives too, so I was able to boot DOS. Then I got to work on supporting the other side.

It seemed a bit complicated to try to merge the two sides into a single FAT filesystem, so I wrote a TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident program) that mapped the other two sides onto additional drive letters.

That turned out to be surprisingly easy. So the four sides on my two floppy drives were A:, B:, C:, and D: drives.

Later I got an awesome Tallgrass 10MB hard drive for only $5000, and that became my E: drive.

Now I knew my storage problems were over: I would never run out of space with that thing!

lobo_tuerto• 13 years ago

Floppy DUO Imperial March:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHJOz_y9rZE

DiabloD3• 13 years ago

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enZ4P7Azxys

Doctor Who on 8 floppies

wpietri• 13 years ago

Especially appropriate for this article given that the top comment is "It's A:\Trap".

jerryr• 13 years ago

Thank you for kicking off the youtubes. I really, really needed to post this here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up863eQKGUI (don't copy that floppy)

thearn4• 13 years ago

It's funny to think that only exposure folks have to floppy disks now is the look of "save" icons.

mratzloff• 13 years ago

My first computer was an Atari 800. It had a cassette deck and a 5 1/4" disk drive. I spent a lot of my youth typing in BASIC games that were printed in magazines and books, then modifying them to learn how it worked. My first programming language...

When my parents brought home an IBM-compatible PC with an enormous 50 MB hard drive I could hardly believe my luck.

Anyway, I don't need this to feel old; my wife already does that. She was in middle school when I was in college, and asks things like, "What's Galaga?" But I suspect she does it on purpose about half the time now...

Osiris• 13 years ago

Luckily in Windows you can reassign drive letters in the Computer Management tool. I've reassigned my two optical drives to A: and B:.

japhyr• 13 years ago

My dad worked for DEC in the 70's and 80's. When I was young he took us in and showed us a cabinet that had a bunch of spinning platters in it. They looked like 12" record albums, but they were light brown and made of metal. At least that's how I remember it, and I imagine they were the precursors to today's spinning hard disks.

My dad let my brother and I take a couple retired disks home. We tried to play frisbee once or twice with them, and then wisely decided that was probably a bad idea.

mililani• 13 years ago

Man, this question makes me feel old as hell--I'm 40, btw. It reminds me of the time when my friend's daughter asked what the car window handle was for. I was like, it rolls the windows up and down. She thought it was a new thing. Wow.

Aloha• 13 years ago

I feel old.

akhatri_aus• 13 years ago

Seeing this made me smile. I haven't seen an A drive for ages now. I dont know about the times before 1998 where most people have a nostalgic memory of these, but they used to self corrupt like crazy all you had to fear was the "Do you want to format Drive A?"

endgame2• 13 years ago

Once upon a midnight dreary, fingers cramped and vision bleary,

System manuals piled high and wasted paper on the floor,

Longing for the warmth of bedsheets,

Still I sat there, doing spreadsheets:

Having reached the bottom line,

I took a floppy from the drawer.

Typing with a steady hand, I then invoked the SAVE command

But got instead a reprimand: it read "Abort, Retry, Ignore."

http://badpets.net/Humor/Tech/NeverMore.html

inlined• 13 years ago

God I feel old. I'm getting flashbacks of a quarter mile sneakernet between my friend & my house where we transferred MP3s on a floppy disk with multi-disk zips.

_pferreir_• 13 years ago

Now I really feel old.

csense• 13 years ago

When I bought a new computer in 2002, I specifically got one which still had a floppy drive, because I wanted to be sure I could play all my DOS games via boot disk [1].

DOSBox [2] was still in its infancy then, and the DOS emulation in Windows was...less than one hundred percent compatible with all the hardware tricks various DOS games used to squeeze the last ounce of performance out of the hardware. (In the DOS days, it was common practice for application programs, especially games, to directly deal with I/O ports, interrupts, DMA, etc.)

[1] A DOS boot disk is similar to a bootable Linux CD / DVD -- removable media containing an OS. In this case, you mainly use it to customize the loaded drivers on a per-game basis. Regardless of how much physical memory you have, in DOS only 640K is conveniently addressable [3], so it's very important to selectively load only the drivers a specific game needs.

[2] http://www.classicdosgames.com/interviews/peterveenstra.html

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conventional_memory

gutsy6• 13 years ago

OH man. Knowing the answer to this makes me feel so old.

So, sooooo old.

mariuolo• 13 years ago

This comes out periodically.

lamontcg• 13 years ago

FML I'm old

What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for?

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