• NigelFrobisher@aussie.zoneEnglish
    0·
    7 天前

    I want to know at what point people started saying the clunkier “hard disk drive” instead of just “hard drive”, because it definitely happened.

  • m3t00🌎🇺🇦@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    7 天前

    A: B: were for dual floppy drives. per dos manual. and fuck off with back slashes. forward slash is fs root / drives are devices under /dev.

      • m3t00🌎🇺🇦@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        7 天前
        1. i was hacking config.sys and autoexec.bat to optimize memory for games. after enough lock-ups, i dove into linux. just deleted my last unused windows partition. cost me a hundred dollars 20 years ago.
  • Jiral@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    7 天前

    / did not care but it was the way of the penguin, the child of the even older gods of ix.

  • farmgineer@nord.pubEnglish
    0·
    9 天前

    Weren’t the first drives magnetic tape? I don’t think I’d call a deck of cards a drive, necessarily, nor TTY or something.

    • Iunnrais@piefed.socialEnglish
      0·
      8 天前

      We’re talking the first Microsoft drives, not the first drives that ever existed. Windows inherits from DOS. DOS was a competitor with CP/M mostly, iirc, and got to invent various standard and quirks all of its own, which passed on to Windows (which was originally a simple shell on top of dos until 95).

        • purple_drank@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          8 天前

          command.com was just the shell (like bash, zsh, Windows Terminal), not the kernel. Pre-NT Windows would use API calls to talk to the DOS kernel, bypassing command.com.

          the Windows GUI win.exe would probably be launched by command.com, though, because it was specified in autoexec.bat, the batch of startup tasks designed to be read by command.com. command.com could be closed after autoexec.bat had run.

          the DOS kernel would generally only be used for 16-bit programs, 32-bit programs were managed by a newer kernel more towards the NT kernel.

          the whole situation was a horrible mess and never worked very reliably.

      • farmgineer@nord.pubEnglish
        0·
        9 天前

        I was trying to think of something that can I/O on the same thing as input which is why I skipped that. I think some nominally could mark a card as read or something, but I don’t think that counts. I may be missing something. I don’t think paper tape could really do output, either. Terminals are interactive and ephemeral so I didn’t think those would be a good fit for a drive, either.

      • Hueristic_Autistic@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        8 天前

        A little more nerd knowledge: Different forms of storage media that were able to have gigabytes of storage on them were already in scientific development way before the first ever cd-r hit the market.

  • lonefighter@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    9 天前

    When I was a wee child we had a box of floppy disks for my first computer. They were all the colors of the rainbow, 5 for each color, and my little neurodivergent self got so much satisfaction sorting them to be in order of the color wheel (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, etc) and I also loved carefully using them as a fidget toy by flipping the little metal piece that covered the disk itself back and forth repeatedly.

    I really miss floppy disks for some dumb reason. I wish they’d bring them back with the same type of technology that is used in micro SD cards, solely for the nostalgia factor.

    • Hueristic_Autistic@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      8 天前

      I used to love sorting my dad’s rolodex of floppy a disks. He had the 5" floppy b’s and he kept those, “for memories” because no one used them anymore at the time.

      He had like 4 floppy rolodex cases.

  • mojofrododojo@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    8 天前

    I remember seeing my first pc with two 5.25" drives. the luxury! you could have two entire data sets accessible, you could jump from one program to another without changing disks…

    then a few years later I got a 20mb hdd, and copied almost everything I owned to it - and still had 3 mb free. a: and b: were nice, but boy wow this hard drive thing was mindblowing

    • Echo Dot@feddit.ukEnglish
      0·
      7 天前

      And here’s me with my one terabyte drive and it’s nearly full. Of what I really couldn’t say, I don’t feel like I have all that much saved on here, but apparently it takes up a whole terabyte.

      • mojofrododojo@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        7 天前

        it’s ok, you can admit it, it’s fulla goat porn.

        hot, steamy, bleaty goat porn. hooves and horns everywhere.

  • Bipauler@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    9 天前

    Wouldn’t careful alignment be 5.25, and the click be 3.5? Or am I way off here? 5.25 are the big black actual floppy discs right? And then 3.5 or the smaller encased in harder shelled plastic with the little snappy metal sliding piece?

    Also, what is going up with the letter p in this screenshot?:

    • CombatWombat@feddit.onlineEnglish
      0·
      9 天前

      I seem to remember a swinging arm that I would click in place after inserting a 5 and a quarter floppy. I do think the 3 and a half floppies ticked a little when you pushed them into the drive, but not nearly so much as clicking the arm in place for the larger ones.

    • ReptilianCleric@lemmy.zipEnglish
      0·
      9 天前

      Pretty sure the first floppies were 7", but there weren’t in use for very long. But, I would agree with your assessment regarding the two sizes most of us were familiar with.

      • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        8 天前

        8", not 7". Apparently, Strategic Air Command was using them to control nuclear weapon launch facilities until surprisingly recently (2019).

        • ReptilianCleric@lemmy.zipEnglish
          0·
          8 天前

          Thanks for the correction; admittedly, those were a little before my time, although I did see then once or twice in the wild.

          Speaking of storage technology that just won’t die, I think magnetic tape backups still exist in one form or another.

          • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
            0·
            8 天前

            Magnetic tape isn’t obsolete at all. Apparently these days they’re up to LTO-10, which can store 40TB per tape, and it’s also the cheapest storage medium per unit capacity (albeit with an extremely high initial cost for the drive itself). The only reason people forget about it is because it isn’t popular for home use.

    • Zorque@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      9 天前

      It’s all the letters along that column. There’s a weird artifacting that bolds everything along that line.

  • ddh@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    0·
    9 天前

    Actually it’s because C: is a happy drive and wants to show it. D: is less positive about things.

    • Verqix@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      8 天前

      “The children must not be shown the old gods” This is true only in the most direct way. There is the effigy known as the save icon, which is in very widespread use. Sometimes this leads to questions of “why does it look like that?” and answers of “clouds used to be plastic rectangles with a metal clicky frame you slotted into the big off-white box”.

    • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      8 天前

      All of it except the part where it implies people immediately abandoned floppies when hard drives showed up. They coexisted for quite a while, and computers would often have one hard drive and one floppy drive (so A:\ and C:\ without B:\).

    • Dicska@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      8 天前

      Others have answered everything, but just to confirm it: when I started secondary school they still had a room full of computers that didn’t have a hard drive. They all worked off of floppy disks. During classes all of them went zugg-zugg-zugg-tsk-tsk.

    • Beangut@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      8 天前

      Mostly, the part where Microsoft said children should not learn the ways of the old gods should be disregarded.

      Every child of the computer should endeavour to learn the old magicks to an extent, many abstractions lay between us and it now but the further one progresses in their studies, the more they will find the old to be a beacon and anchor guiding to them to the rightful truth they require.

    • prettybunnys@piefed.socialEnglish
      0·
      8 天前

      Yes, a and b were floppy drives and are “reserved” insomuch as C:\ is the default for compatibility reasons.

      A and B were floppy

        • RobertoOberto@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          0·
          8 天前

          There was a brief window of time where CD burners were new and beyond my financial reach, and so were new Zip drives, but companies were dumping Zip drives for rewritable CDs. I managed to score a free external Zip drive that was going to be trashed, and it was a godsend of an upgrade from 3.5" floppies.

          Until I got a second-hand CD-RW drive, then I dumped it too.

        • SavinDWhales@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          8 天前

          Yes, but they got the letter Z, obviously. For the makers spoke: I created Windows 95 and I will give you the power to map your drive letters. But behold! Thou shake only map removable drives and let the hard drives be, for these are still assigned the old way by the old system.

        • Hueristic_Autistic@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          8 天前

          My dad thought they were gonna be the fucking future and was trying to get everyone in the house to use it and my mom knew about the fact they can die and that she’d rather use disks.

          I liked it, it sucked when my first ever back up of all my files from the family computer was no longer accessible due to the red light of death.

      • Hudell@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        0·
        8 天前

        What I never understood was why eventually the B letter stopped being used even on machines that had two floppy disk drives. I remember very clearly using the second floppy on E:, F: and sometimes even D:, but I’ve never seen it being used as B:.

        Was it reserved to some kind of swapping system that later became irrelevant with hard disks?

        • bstix@feddit.dkEnglish
          0·
          8 天前

          I think the convention was to put the fixed internal drives first because they were more unlikely to change, and then use the later letters for external swappable drives.

          In the time when the B: drive was relevant a lot of software might have had hard coded the letters, so it made sense to avoid it to preserve the compability with legacy software as more drives were added.

  • Mulligrubs@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    8 天前

    And before A: and B:, we had cassette tape decks for our Commodores!

    It took 40 minutes to load a program.

    You don’t know what a cassette or a Commodore is, do you? Damn kids, get off my lawn

      • AppleTea@lemmy.zipEnglish
        0·
        8 天前

        I think a lot of people who know what a cassette is would be surprised by one that holds computer files.

    • ouRKaoS@lemmy.todayEnglish
      0·
      8 天前

      I had a cassette drive for my CoCo3 from RadioShack.

      I spent a weekend typing in code in BASIC from a magazine to play a shitty pacman clone, tried to save it to the tape, and forgot the first few inches on a new cassette aren’t magnetic and can’t save anything…

      • BloodBlight@lemmy.zipEnglish
        0·
        8 天前

        But have you seen Sonic the Hedgehog run at 60 FPS on a C64 though the magic of the REU’s DMA? PRAISE BE THE FORGOTTEN!