Programmer Humor

My first computer was Tandy. 8088 chip, I think. Orange monochrome monitor. No hard drive, 2x 5.25 floppers.

That sounds just like my first PC! I bought it secondhand in 1983 or 84. It was fancy because most monitors were green, and the two floppies meant you didn't have to remove the program disk to save a file. I remember laboriously typing out the code for Eliza, the first chatbot. I had a daisy wheel printer too - the paper was fan-fold and had sprocket holes down the sides.

RadioShack Tandy 1000-TX was our first desktop.. Technically, I think we had a VIC20 for a couple weeks that was hooked up to our TV but it got returned and damn am I glad we got that IBM-compatible, CGA graphics, loud-ass behemoth.

I can still hear the sound of the floppy drives intializing on bootup. A: was 3.5" and B: was 5.25" and the way they sounded made my 6-year old self so happy. I used to make the noises myself as it came online.

Years later, when I write this post, I will think.. why did I ever doubt my autism diagnosis?

i think even usb floppies show up as a:, don’t they?

They do. And virtual floppy drives on a virtual machine show up as A:/B: too.

You didn’t mention Arch. You’re not an Ubuntu user are you?

Well, bugs happen. I'm not as glad about them being dead, they had a ton of great titles, two of my favourite series being NOLF and Empire Earth

Going to show my age again now.

I think post 1990, they were rare. Essentially there was a time before that though, when computers often didn't have a hard drive. Because they were like 10MB and cost thousands of whatever your currency may be.

So in those days (8088/8086 based systems largely), it was common for there to be 2x5.25" drives. A: and B:. C: was a status symbol, the lambo of the early computer era.

As hard drives became more affordable (for levels of affordability), there was also the rise of the new disk type. 3.5". In that case it wasn't too uncommon to have a 3.5" drive, a 5.25" drive and a hard disk. So you'd have A:, B: and C:.

I think after the mid 90s the much more common setup was a single high density 3.5" drive A: and a hard disk C:. In the office we also had an F: drive (Novell netware network drive).

A: and B: were by and large kept free out of that history. I am pretty sure you can map HDDs/SSDs to them these days though if you want to.

For that brief period in the mid-'90s I owned a PC with twin 3½" floppy drives. I never really used the second one, but I enjoyed the novelty and the fact that all my drive letters were in use. I also saw a handful of computers with both 3½" and 5¼" drives in some of the university PC labs. I don't think I ever saw anyone use the 5¼" slot of any of them, but the 3½" floppy drives got a decent amount of use.

Fun fact though: You could still use B: in DOS commands even if you only had an A: drive. The system would prompt you to switch disks as and when A: was about to pretend to be B: and then switch back afterwards.

Before hard drives it was pretty common for systems to have two floppy drives, A: and B:

I was too young to catch the 5.25 ones, but had a 3.5 floppy drive. For me the question was more of "where did B: go?"

I think one important detail that's missing in the OP is the reason you would have not one but two reserved floppy drives. It was so that you could copy files from one floppy to another and duplicate floppies much more easily. Also, when installing games that came on multiple floppies, you could have one drive going while you switched the other one out. For this reason both A: and B: ended up reserved for floppies, as many people had more than one.

I lowkey tried to decipher the hidden message before I realised the weird letters are all in a straight vertical line. Looks like someone may have imperfectly stitched two screenshots together, for whatever reason.

In my mind it will always and forever be the CD-ROM drive, but any drive added to a standard Windows system (including partitions) will just continue the alphabet from C. So if you install a second hard drive (or partition your only one) it will become D, the next one will be E, and so on:

I’ll leave it to someone else to convey this in a biblical fashion.

Fabled? It's perfectly ordinary. I see the D drive all the time. At home it used to be an HDD to store things that didn't need the speed of the SSD (media, documents, etc), and now it's where USB drives end up on my work laptop.

You should be able to name a drive with any Unicode character. Yes, including emoji.

Not true, you can connect as many Drives as physically possible, but they won't all have letters assigned. I think there's a way to access a drive without a letter, but anyway you can still mount it as a path under an existing letter.

don't forget the invisible pseudo-files that follow you around the tree in case you need to print something from a dos program