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I’m not reading all that. Upvote.
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
But why a backslash as separator? Why ô why!
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.
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.”
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…Anything after C:\ was basically as you wanted, no? It might have been an optical drive, it might have been a second HDD.
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.
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.
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.
Actually it’s because C: is a happy drive and wants to show it. D: is less positive about things.
The :D drive on the other hand is just ecstatic.
Happy drive?
You sound like Bob Ross :)Give me the D:!
Is this accurate?
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.
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:\).Also it was a lot more religious than the post implies.
“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”.
Yes, a and b were floppy drives and are “reserved” insomuch as C:\ is the default for compatibility reasons.
A and B were floppy
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.
King’s Quest, Space Quest…
Heros Quest II: so you want to be a hero.
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?:
It’s all the letters along that column. There’s a weird artifacting that bolds everything along that line.
Stretching, not bolding. Look at the p in floppy
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.
It would pop the ejection button into place when you put it in the drive ☺️ I mss that click. You just knew it was working.
It depended on the model i think. I remember having exactly 1 3.5 drive with the clicky arm, but all the others did the tape deck thing.
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.
8", not 7". Apparently, Strategic Air Command was using them to control nuclear weapon launch facilities until surprisingly recently (2019).
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.
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.
just a couple days ago fuji announced they were investing a lot more into tape:
https://www.techspot.com/news/114394-fujifilm-pours-64-million-magnetic-tape-production-ai.html
Shouldn’t data centers be doing reels of data tape then instead of taking all our forms of removable media?
Wouldn’t that make a lot more sense? 40tb reels sound a lot more effective than a 4tb HD. Probably a lot less heat too.
Well, they can only be read linearly so they suck for random-access storage. But they are used in data centers, for backups.
the p tank is full
Jokes on you old gods, my blu ray drive is B:
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.
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).
even 95 is still running dos at it’s core. NT4, 2000 finally moved away from loading shit on top of command.com
That’s a fair point; I got distracted thinking of history.
Does a reel count as a “drive?”
Actual hard drives (i.e. spinning metallic platters) go all the way back to 1956 (and predate floppies by 11 years):
Magnetic tape reels do win if they count, though. They were invented in 1951.
Sources:
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.
I was thinking of equipment my dad worked with, mostly by DEC IIRC, that had tape reels. Another user made the point, though, that they may never have mattered for MS specifically which is what the OP was about.
I’d imagine the first drives were boxes of punch cards.
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.
