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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/62743547
I mean I purchased an external floppy for my undergrad laptop as recently as... 2004... Oh shit that was 22 years ago... Fuck a kid born a year later can legally buy alcohol and a kid born then is graduating from undergraduate....
When did I get old?
Easy. At some point between then and now.
People talk about the legacy of the floppy disk (mid-eighties to mid-aughts) being used as a save icon, but drive letters are even more extreme - and absurd - than that.
CP/M came out in 1974 and introduced drive letters A: and B: for floppy drives, and Microsoft copied that for DOS and the early DOS-based versions of Windows. Microsoft finally killed off the DOS lineage with Windows Me in 2000, so that was 26 years of drive letters actually being part of the OS' architecture.
Windows NT came out in 1993 - 19 years after CP/M - and didn't use drive letters but for the sake of backwards compatibility and familiarity it would emulate them. All versions of Windows since 2000 are based on NT. So we had 26 years of drive letters being needed, and 33 years of faking it for consistency.
I remember the first computer my family had, when i was around 5 hears old, was an old IBM something with a laborious switch to power it on. Like a flick switch that pulled a metal rod, i dont know the specifics but this rod must have moved something to complete and electrical circuit and the thing came to life.
It had 1 floppy drive and a blanker for a second. A: and B: were reserved for these drives. Windows 3.11 was installed from 12 floppy disks and we ran all of our games from DOS. Except lemmings which was built into the OS.
The box was horizontal, that classic beige colour and had the classic IBM 2 button mouse. No speakers. No modem. A 12 inch crt screen (in matching beige)
We had a dot matrix printer that we never replaced the ink ribbon for. So after that ran dry we just used the paper for drawing on.
I miss that machine.
The upper letters have also lost their use with UNC paths. in the 2000's and 2010's, we had so many drive letters at my workplaces. I hardly used any of them, but they still mapped a bunch by default for departments that still relied on them. Now they're on NAS drives or SharePoint, which you can just access without mapping. I just pinned the ones I use in File Explorer so they're there but not "mapped".
I still have an F: drive on my current company machine for some reason. It used to be a network home directory backup, but after OneDrive, I'm not sure where it points or why it still exists. Because I'm the sort of person who sees a YouTube video about what happened to Novell Netware and immediately click play, I recently learned that F: was the typical home drive letter for Novell Netware, with company/departmental share drives starting with G: or later. (https://support.novell.com/docs/Tids/Solutions/10027779.html) I remember in the early 2000's people still calling those drives and the login screen "Novell" even though it was Windows NT and NT shares by that point.
I need a historical fantasy book in this concept.
I just need to pause and reflect on the level of commitment in that post. They started out strong, and just kept on going.
Absolutely outstanding.
Us Linux heathens never had any of the letter gods, we just worship the one and only, the beginning and the end, the alpha and the omega, the one true god:
/
is that on /dev/sda ?
It's always there, even before anything is mounted. You just overlay a filesystem over it during boot.
But they were, all of them, deceived, for another drive was made.
Yeah /dev/sda
I found out about an unlimited drive that big tech doesn't want you to know about, it's called /dev/null
It's amazing how much you can store in /dev/null
I got you, OP…
C:\DOS
C:\DOS\RUN
RUN\DOS\RUN
Back in the XP era, I set a hard drive to B and random installers would refuse to target it because they insisted it was too small. Good times.
And the CD-ROM drive was D:
It was called "D" for "disk", duh.
(The above comment for legal purposes is a joke.)
"D" was actually used for "Drink Holder"
*disc
I was convinced I had seen the spelling 'disk' before, so I looked it up and found this (new to me) and interesting distinction on wiktionary.
In most varieties of English, disk is the preferred spelling for magnetic media (hence floppy disk, hard disk, disk drive), whereas disc is preferred for optical media (hence compact disc, digital versatile disc, optical disc). For all other uses, disk is preferred in American English and acceptable in Canadian English, and disc otherwise. Less commonly, disc is used for magnetic media (as in floppy disc and discette); similarly, disk is sometimes used for optical media, as in compact disk and optical disk.
But also both forms seem to be usable for geometric disc shapes.
We still pay homage to the old gods with the "save" icon
I was explaining to my kids about floppy disks, and mentioned the save icon. The what? The button you press to save. It just says "save" they said.
I think they use the Google suite at school, and apparently the save button just says "save". Although TBH I half expected them to not know of it because of auto-saving.
Me pressing ctrl-s all the time in a google docs window
Fun fact: that's why we call them icons.
They are trying to change those icons now, too. People dont recognize them so they use others.
Tribute to all the old high priests who were executing the extended memory settings ritual based on each software requirements! We are the guardians of ancient knowledde!
You shall never be forgotten, sacred Amstrad 1512 DD, 512kB of RAM and Dual Drives, luxury of your time! Praise be to DR DOS an GEM Desktop!
Anyone: "In the beginning..."
My Freakin' Brain: "Inne de beninng-ing."
Glad to see I wasn't the only one lol
"And the bios sayeth unto the user: Come forth and insert disk 23 of 30. And they did so. When the needle of the drive tested the disk, it had become corrupted, verily."
"Thus the monkey of the isle demanded Disk 114 be inserteth. Yet there was no Disk 114 and much confusion was sewn."
Adventure Island for NES stumped me for a while until I learned you had to do the thing
Windows people are starting to name their ssd a: and b:
It's horrible
I use B: for my BluRay drive. Seemed appropriate.
We won't talk about what ray the A: drive is.
The old ways are being forgotten. The oral history of the gray beards.
‘Dances with ribbons of mainframe tape’
Rise ye old ones RISE