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You could select the disk and then "Eject". Dragging to the trash was a shortcut to unmount and eject. As for Macs not having the problem, this doesn't require

You could select the disk and then "Eject". Dragging to the trash was a shortcut to unmount and eject. As for Macs not having the problem, this doesn't require qualification. Not only did Macs not have the problem, they treated disks as logical _volumes_ rather than physical devices. If you ejected a disk mid-save on a Mac it would complain, and if you inserted the wrong disk it would reject it and ask for the right one. If you did the same thing on a DOS/Windows machine it would correct the new disk (and leave the old disk corrupted too). Similarly, you could copy files from one disk to another without having two disk drives in Finder (it was a pain in the neck, swapping the disks, but it worked). Other computers needed special software and relied on the user to insert the correct disk. This advantage continues to this day. Windows still refers to devices by physical location.

digi_owl 11y ago
> Windows still refers to devices by physical location. Nope, not since NT. I learned that the hard way when moving a HDD containing Win2k around. Even though it was hooked to IDE master it would come up as D: as that was what it was assigned after it got formated with NTFS. You can go into disk manager and assign a partition any letter than is not already in use. You can even mount a partition into a existing FHS, much like on unix, but i can't say i have seen it used often. Basically the letters are there for backwards compatibility.