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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/62743547
And then there’s Linux, no pondering about media before, it just cares which it found after another on each interface upon boot.
Also, I’m sure the alphabet naming thing came from C/C++, which came after C, which borrowed from B, etc. And yes, there is a D, but people prefer scripting languages because reasons.
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?
I used a floppy disk yesterday. In some businesses we use old equipment for a long time. Because it works.
I remember building a computer in 2004 and finally making the decision to not include a floppy drive since I had just been booting from the CD drive for the past couple of issues anyways.
I was reminded of this several years later when I made the decision not to include a disk drive in my latest build.
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 need a historical fantasy book in this concept.
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.
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.
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.
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 wherever came loading from initramfs and vmlinuz. Basically, whatever BIOS/UEFI found as the Lord of the Roots.
It's always there, even before anything is mounted. You just overlay a filesystem over it during boot.
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.
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.
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.
It’s probably a replication on our languages.
For example, in Swedish… it’s spelled telefon, not telephone. I was trying to think of a word, where in Swedish, it’s a k whereas in English, it’s a c. Ah, yes - katten for cat, as in felix.
Did you know that laser, as in laser disc, is likely from the Swedish word läser, which means to read.
Not the greatest week for grammar nazis either it seems
"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
Appreciate you talking in code to avoid spoilers for a game released in 1986.
Would hate to spoil that for anyone
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!