3w ago

Ancient traditions

138 comments

- B is the real grandpa

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.
  
  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.
- 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
- I keep my storage hard drive assigned to B so the optical drive is still D.
  
  You monster.
- Make it G: violate unspoken rules.
  
  If you have never assigned a drive to F: or G:, how can you even say you lived?
- 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.

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.
- I remember feeling cool when we got our ZIP 250 drive
- 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.
- 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?

B: entered the chat
- Dudes with a B: were 1337
  
  and/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.
- B: entered before the pins 0xA-0xF twist.

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

Of course I know him, he's me!
/dev/sda1
- I think the equivalent would be /dev/fd0 or something like that
  
  TIL https://askubuntu.com/a/1356812

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
  
  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.
- 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.
- 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.

Brrrrr ck
Cachk-cachk
Nrrrrrrrrrr
Yeah i can hear that drive letter 35 years after the fact

I just realized I had forgotten about drive letters altogether.

I’ve been a Mac user since 1989 and what is A:?
ETA: Never change Lemmy
- Floppy disk drive.
  A and B were reserved and your first hard disk drive was C.
  The two disk drives had fixed memory addresses because they were often specific ports on the motherboard, and loaded the OS, etc. Things after that were more dynamic.
- Look at Mr. System 6 over here! I grew up on System 7 myself.
  I bet you were transferring all your files over the internet encoded in BinHex format, eh?
  
  It was actually System 1. My dad bought an old used Mac because the GUI made more sense than the DOS PCs in his price range.
- https://superuser.com/questions/231273/what-are-the-windows-a-and-b-drives-used-for#233284
- Weird corpo syntax for automatic mounts under an old OS.
- Floppy disk drive

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!

Oh yeah, that reminds me of that time SO's PC had C: for the OS and D: for data and wanted to format it, so i booted it to DOS (i think it was still win 98 SE) and happily formatted C: only to discover that in DOS i was actually formatting D:... fun times.

drive letters are cursed

When I'm on Windows, I use subst A: %USERPROFILE%\GitHub to mount my local repos as drive A for shorter paths.
- Neat.

not me with my
/dev/sda
- /dev/sdA

Shit man, take me back to the ",8,1" days
- The absolute insanity of Commodore disk commands (especially without a fast loader cart) just boggles my mind. These were accepted by a whole-ass company. A very successful one, no less.
  
  I absolutely adore the old wild west landscape that was the old 8 bit micros. There were some really wacky things that were tried out, both from a technical aspect and a UX aspect
- I started with ",1,1". I never found a reason why they went from 1 for cassette to 8-15 for disk. Must have been a bit indicator thing.
  
  Devices 2-7 are available as various pieces of hardware if you have the hardware.
  It doesn't say this, but I suspect that disks received a higher default number than printers because the 1541 disk drive went to market after several printers were already on the market.
- +++ath

I don’t get it. What was the Q:?
- "A:" was the floppy drive letter
- That's where you put the save icon

Who here remembers turning part of the ide cable round to add a second floppy drive?
- Probably noone because floppys dont use ide.
- Are you sure it was IDE? I remember jumpers for master, slave, and Cable Select so you're probably right.
  I think it might have also applied to floppy drives or MFM / ESDI drives but that is going back a while.
  
  It was actually an FDD cable which was 34 pins instead of 40 for the IDE cable. My mistake!

I miss floppies. Putting them in and taking them out was so satisfying. Remember when you had to install stuff with like a hundred of them? The ker-chicks and that smooth sliding feel as the sheath slid open....
- I had reason to use an optical drive lately, and even that was a blast from the past. Hitting eject, watching the light blink and then the drawer opens. USB-based storage just isn't the same.
  
  I regularly use optical drives for the movies. Why should I pay twice the price to "buy" some movie from Apple or Google? I rather wait 2 days for the mailman to deliver me a Blu-ray that doesn't only have better quality, but also keeps working when some company decides to stop licensing the stuff I purportedly "bought". Second-hand discs sometimes cost as much as 1€.
  But well, I might be a bit old school, as I just got a few new vinyls delivered to me the other day.
- Theme Park came on 8 floppies, was my first game.
  
  If Rollercoaster Tycoon was more of a tycoon/business game...
  I try to play it on occasion out of nostalgia, but it has so much jank! Haha
- Ahhh yes. Sitting there drinking tea and flippin' floppies for half an hour or even longer. And there was always that one that would read well.

Sorry, been busy
Stuff to do.

"D-drive letters," gasped out the Linux crowd between peals of riotous laughter.
- "If we just make them files in /dev, we can have more than 26 drives"
  -- Linus, probably
  (Yes, I know it's from Unix. It's a joke.)

/dev/fd0

My disk was a floppy until you walked by. Now it's solid state.

i still kinda like the big floppy design. It just looks like it means business.
- THIS IS THE SHIT! GIMME A HELL YEAH! THE FUTURE IS HERRE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I only use the PRNDL letters to drive

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.
  
  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.
  
  In windows you can mount drives as folders to get around this

💾
- that's the save icon
  was A: reserved for save icons?? makes no sense

Feels like an eternity that I last used single-letter drive names ...

I always found it strange how windows treated drives. Who decided an alphabetical letter should be another mounted system? And also shares having the same naming. So strange...

I still have my tape drive.
- I'm glad my punch tape drive is long gone. We used a paper punch tape reel to reel on a garden cart to wheel around the shop floor to load CNC programs onto CNC mills. Often with hand written gcode. Gods, I hated that thing. Floppies were far faster and far more reliable.
  
  My dad had a punch tape and I remember he hated the shit out of that thing.

..."A long time."

Windows storage guide, from A to ZZ

I think I still have a few 3 1/2" and even 5 1/4" around here somewhere. I even had a 120mb Superdisk drive. I bought it used and got 4 or 5 years of use from it. It could hold 1000's of CNC programs and even CAD drawings.
***Great Googlely Moogely! You can still get Super disks on eBay!

I set my memory card reader to the letter A, but I also have my old Lightscribe DVD drive (and looking for one optical drive for my ThinkPad), and have a few floppy drives put away for potential hobby projects.

I had A: and B: back in the days.

138 comments