this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2026
815 points (99.4% liked)

Programmer Humor

33997 readers
1897 users here now

Welcome to Programmer Humor!

This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!

For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.

Rules

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] jdr@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

A CD drive but no hard disk? ~~I don't know of a DOS/Windows that would accept such a thing.~~

edit: nonsense

[–] daychilde@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

CD drivers did exist for DOS and you could absolutely boot up a system with one or two floppies, and one optical drive. MSCDEX.EXE was apparently what allowed you to connect to the optical drive.

[–] jdr@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

You're totally right. You could put DOS on one floppy and the driver on the other or just load it into RAM.

https://archive.org/details/dos-with-cd-rom-support

[–] daychilde@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

I never did it - by the time I had an optical drive, I had hard drives - but I kinda wish I had such a system. So wild to have like 500 times the data on a CD (much less DVD) than the floppied you booted from! lol.

Imagine the chaos if you could write to multi-writable CDs, too. lol. THat would have been wild.