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- cross-posted to:
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I want to know at what point people started saying the clunkier “hard disk drive” instead of just “hard drive”, because it definitely happened.
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.
I get you, but it’d fuck up my title, and it was also 1996 the last time I used them.
- 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.
/ did not care but it was the way of the penguin, the child of the even older gods of ix.
Hail Hard Drive! Praised be its name!
Do not cite the Deep Magic to me, Witch! I was there when it was written.
The Omnissiah’s will be done.
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
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…
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!
LOAD “*”,1,1
LOAD “*”,8,1 if you had a fancy 1541
To this day, the most advanced floppy drive ever made.
I remember having to bang on it to realign the heads
Yes pretty much everyone alive knows what a cassette is. They might not know what a Commodore is specifically
I think a lot of people who know what a cassette is would be surprised by one that holds computer files.
My piano also starts on C 🤔
There’s a great Calvin’s dad answer in there somewhere.
“Ha! C used to be the first letter. Then a famous Roman emperor added A and B at the beginning because typing was too hard without them.”
“They had computers back then?”
“Oh no, they used typewriters. But none of the oldest typewriters survived because they were made from Ea Nasir’s inferior copper.”
CIA
/dev/sda
How hard was that?
Don’t forget /dev/mmcblk0p1 and /dev/nvme0n1p4how4fucking7long1must6these5get
I get nvme# as the drive number and p# as the partition number, but I never got what n# meant.
NVMe drives can be partitioned by the hardware.
There could be multiple drives on a drive and n# is the hardware partition.
Namespace isn’t it? Are there any reasonable use cases for it
Well, for example, you need multiple partitions on a system drive. Such as swap, boot and the main partition for the OS
That’s the name of it. 🙂 I was letting a dog outside and couldn’t remember the technical name.
Under-provisioning the drive is the most common usage I’ve seen.
Maybe passing it directly to a VM, but I haven’t tried that.
You can blame them on systemd.
To be fair I blame everything on system d
What happened to systems a-b-c… ?
You’ve got me sweating now thinking about this. What happened before System-V and sysvinit?
Oddly (or not, depending on your views on versioning) System V was preceded by System III which was actually the first version.
Simply lovely. There long names are for mounting since they are persistent w ross reboots.
The short ones can change of there are no mounting options or more or fewer devices than before.
PS: even the networking devices have this funky naming
I’m not reading all that. Upvote.
You should, though. It’s beatiful!
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
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.
it’s ok, you can admit it, it’s fulla goat porn.
hot, steamy, bleaty goat porn. hooves and horns everywhere.
The 3.5 Floppy A’s… My school was underfunded and in 2008 we used floppy disks for our writing assignments. Other schools had flash drives and you weren’t allowed to use your own because they, “weren’t secure.”
But why a backslash as separator? Why ô why!
No no, the real question is why CR LF instead of LF or CR? Why two characters for a line break motherfuckers?
Because Teleprinters! Carriage return goes back to the start of the line, line feed goes to the next line. If you wanted “bold” on a teleprinter you just did a CR without the LF and printed the same text over the top again.
It makes assignments seem longer.
When they added directories to DOS, they decided that the colons used as a separator on the DEC system they were basing it on were silly, and the forward slashes used by Unix were nicer. Forward slashes were already the character used to identify something as a command line option rather than a filename on DOS, though, because the world hadn’t settled on Unix’s dash convention yet, and lots of existing software just checked whether an argument contained forward slashes to decide whether or not it was a filename. That software would break if paths could contain forward slashes. However, there was a tempting character on the keyboard originally used to type ∨ and ∧ before unicode that was also a slash, so they used that.
Because forward slashes are used in English
I wonder if it’s legal to have a forward slash in a filename on Windows?
Nope, I use ⧸ as a replacement.
D: was usually a cd drive, and E: was the second cd but this time it wrote those disks.
Then later E became D, and died such…D: E: etc just get assigned as you added drives. D: was usually the CD drive because usually people only had 1 hard drive. I had 3 at one point and my CD drive was F:
And when you installed a game using one CD drive but dared to want to play it from the other the next day because the first was busy…
Anything after C:\ was basically as you wanted, no? It might have been an optical drive, it might have been a second HDD.
Even C could be what you wanted.
But since you needed A and often had B because of two different disk sizes C was the first open slot.
In theory you could mix and match but a lot of software didnt work with that and it was better to stick to this informal convention
Made it really awkward when your “data only” D: drive died and you suddenly find out the windows installer decided to put the boot sector there.
No, of course you can’t just reinstall the OS, there’s an irreplaceable license tied to it. If we can’t get it working, the company dies. Good luck.
Second HDD!? What for? Did you ran out of your 36MB? *
*36mb was my first drive I can remember clearly - when we got it we thought we would never run out of space. Obviously HDDs didn’t start at 36 - not even at 16.
Is this accurate?
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.
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.
“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”.
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:\andC:\withoutB:\).The BIOS part is not correct but that’s nitpicking. Also omits the second coming of floppies through ZIP drives.
Also it was a lot more religious than the post implies.
obviously. The author is just making it humorous by leaning on religion tropes
I think you might’ve misread my comment ;-)
Yes, a and b were floppy drives and are “reserved” insomuch as C:\ is the default for compatibility reasons.
A and B were floppy
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?
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.
Remember that weird period of zip disks?
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.
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.
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.
That’s where we got half our electronics from, the good ol’ corporate recycle bin.
I had a windows 98SE laptop as a kid with a full power dock and a tiny bubble jet printer.
Zip drive
click…click…
click…click…
<noooooooooo>
That was my
E:\drive!(
D:\was the CD-ROM, of course.)
Yeah, with some embellishment.
