25 ms·
For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used?
- bnastic 16y agoSSD is the best upgrade we can do these days? Kids don't know what it feels to upgrade from a C-64 with a "datasette" to an early Atari 520ST with 3.5" floppies. THAT was an upgrade, everything else pales in comparison.
- codeup 16y agoKnowing the answer and feeling somewhat nostalgic about it makes me feel old!
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- mootothemax 16y agoand feeling somewhat nostalgic about it And then remembering taking forever to save anything on a school computer, only for the floppy to read half the file and die when I got home. It's amazing - maybe it was the crappy quality of floppies I was using, or maybe I was using them for too long, but for me, regularly not being able to read data back off a floppy was a fact of life. Times have definitely changed for the better :)
- danielh 16y agoNorton Disk Doctor to the rescue! Even if it couldn't save the data, you could reuse the floppy. They were expensive at the time. Out of curiosity, I just googled for prices and it seems prices stayed about the same since I bought the last pack.
- mootothemax 16y agoNorton Disk Doctor to the rescue! Even if it couldn't save the data, you could reuse the floppy. Not only reuse but be pleasantly surprised yet irritated at the same time because suddenly the disk was magically usable again!
- gawker 16y agoYou can say that again. Reminds me of having to reinstall Windows 95 and swapping out 13-ish floppy disks. The good old days!
- giu 16y agoThis question makes me feel old. And I'm in my early twenties.
- redthrowaway 16y agoMe too. My first thought at seeing that question was, "I am too young to feel this old."
- saint-loup 16y agoMy thoughts exactly.
- DanI-S 16y agoThe singularity is coming!
- leppie 16y agoMe too :\
- rbanffy 16y agoI started in computing with an Apple II+ (not really - my II+ was only the first to have floppies). I always wondered why those poor CP/M (and MSX) users had to put up with such nonsense as drive letters ;-)
- trezor 16y agoI started out with an Amiga before moving to the PC. The Amiga (while still dealing with device-roots) at least had a more flexible system. fd0: was floppy 1. If you had an additional drive, that would be fd1: etc. The best part was that you could also access devices by file-system label, so if you needed to make sure you were accessing not only a floppy, but the device labelled "WorkbenchExtras" you would simply do WorkbenchExtras: Needless to say, this made multi-disk tasks & scripting rather pleasant, easy and cut out lots of boilerplate and checking. It was a nice system and I kinda miss it. Edit: df0: was floppy 1. dh0: was first harddrive, etc. Not that in changes much.
- jaywalker 16y agoBest comment: I never anticipated this day would ever come....
- retube 16y agoI remember having an Amstrad 640k. Two 5 1/4 floppy drives, no hard disk. Booting it up involved putting in about 5 disks one after the other and took about 20 minutes. Ah those were the days.
- rbanffy 16y ago5 disks? What were you running?
- iwwr 16y agoI remember a time when you needed to carry 30 floppies to be able to copy C&C:Red Alert... and it was worth it.
- mariani 16y agoSame for when the demo of Quake came out, loved it.
- bad_user 16y agoI remember playing Quake on a 486 at 66 MHz. Performance was terrible, but this was real 3D with a cool atmosphere. My Quake came on a CD though ... which I loved because of the included Nine Inch Nails soundtrack.
- Semiapies 16y agoI just spent two nights pulling that ~10MB down from a BBS. 10 fps 3D action!
- electromagnetic 16y agoI just used the CD trick when playing multiplayer. You start the game with the disc in one computer and then eject and run into the next room to start the game on that computer. I think 9/10ths of the games I played with my brother were exploited with this trick until the warez scenes started developing proper and timely released nocd cracks.
- LordLandon 16y agoWhy? Westwood were probably the only game company that understood this problem, and shipped their games on two CDs (allies and soviets), even if the content was mostly identical, and could all easily fit on one, just so that two people could play at once.
- electromagnetic 16y agoIt wasn't a particular problem with Westwood games, although it was when we got another player involved. I was thinking more of Age of Empires when actually saying that, I remember getting a 3-way going using a single disc. We managed a 7-player at school, but that was using 2 discs.
- redthrowaway 16y agoWho else remembers using the square punch to put a hole in those 3 1/2" AOL disks to reformat them as HD?
- chopsueyar 16y agoThey had something similair for 5 1/4" floppies to go from 360k to 720k. Get off my lawn.
- jefffoster 16y agoMy first stab at being an entrepreneur was buying normal 3.5" disks, stamping holes in them and selling them as pristine 3.5" HD disks. Let's just say it was less successful than I'd hoped.
- zandorg 16y agoI did this on an Acorn Archimedes disk and though okay at first, the floppy got corrupted after a few days. Bad idea!
- waqf 16y agoThe Archimedes would format any floppy to any density, so you didn't need the hole punch.
- zandorg 16y agoMy point was that formatting a 800kb disk to 1600kb (as you could on the Archimedes) is likely to - and in my experience has - corrupt after a few days of use, and thus is not worth the amount of money saved. Luckily it was just copied games that got corrupted, but it could have been worse.
- yardie 16y agoMy first stab at being an entrepreneur was buying up used floppies for pennies slapping a blank label on them and selling them for $1 a piece. But I was a pushover so most people could bargain me down to $2-3 for a pack of five.
- othello 16y agoThis reminds me that even us twenty-somethings may one day be made every bit as clumsy and baffled by whatever comes up 30 years from now as our own proverbial mothers are today...
- julian37 16y agoLike this, linked from the article: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/12/12/ http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/12/12/
- erikstarck 16y agoQuite fascinating how some design decisions tend to stick due to technical or other reasons. We will probably still run Windows 2020 on the C-drive. Sometimes the reason is backwards compatiblity, other times it's something that requires a huge redesign of an entire system. But, most of the time I think it's because people simply think that this is the way things are supposed to be. One example is how long it took before Auto-ISO became an option on DSLRs. In all cases there are opportunities for a startup to be disruptive. So, keep looking for those C-drives!
- jedsmith 16y agoA massive pile of legacy Windows stuff probably assumes C: is the boot volume. Windows has always had extensive backward compatibility, even if it requires tweaking to run 9x programs on XP and up. I often wonder how much better Windows could be if Microsoft were to choose to repeat OS X's innovation, which was almost completely severing backward compatibility.
- brudgers 16y ago>"A massive pile of legacy Windows stuff probably assumes C: is the boot volume." Seeing as Windows has been bootable from removable drives and over networks for a long time, I sincerely doubt it.
- roel_v 16y agoWhen you read it as 'a massive pile of legacy Windows applications', which is reasonable, it's not a stretch to assume that many applications written in the last 20 years assume that the OS is on a harddisk, and on C: for that matter.
- brudgers 16y agoPrior to Windows 95 the preponderance of Windows programs were 16bit. Seeing as 16bit programs are not compatible with recent versions of Windows one can be reasonably assured that they are not in that vast pool of legacy applications. Hand in hand with 32bit Windows came the registry, which is where most applications stored configuration information until relatively recent times. To the best of my recollection, I have not seen an application or utility hard coded to C: since Windows 95. But I would be interested to learn of the actual examples which support your assumptions.
- bhavin 16y agoOne might wonder why the first two letters are for floppy and not HDD. If you follow the drive letters, going from A to higher alphabets generally give you evolution of technology (ignoring network map Z:). A: - floppy C:/D: - HDD E: - CD/DVD F: - External Storage
- pwg 16y agoBecause MsDos, at least in its early versions, could not dynamically assign new drive letters to newly inserted disks. So the workaround, which is still with us years later in Windows 7, was to reserve at boot time the first two letters (A/B) for drives with removable media (i.e., floppy drives, there were no usb flash dongles in those days).
- Qz 16y agoI don't think that's true for Vista or Windows 7. I have B:\ as a Backup partition from my second HD on both.
- ramchip 16y agoDoes your computer have a floppy drive?
- dfox 16y agoAnd this was perfected in Windows 95 which always had drive A:\ visible in My Computer even on computers without actual floppy drive (in that case it was named "Removable drive", had generic removable drive icon and did nothing useful).
- stuhacking 16y agoPerhaps it's because the first IBM PC did not have an internal hard disk as standard?
- lovskogen 16y agoHow long before a question like "My DVD wont play in this old computers DVD player?"?
- flexd 16y agoThis makes me remember elementary school and saving stuff on floppies, and that i have Sango fighter on floppies in a drawer somewhere. They really do not make games as good as they were before!
- JacobAldridge 16y agoThe past ain't what it used to be.
- nevvermind 16y agoThere are too many "this makes me feel old" in here. And in SO, for that matter. You snob folks...
- Maro 16y agoWhy does that make us snobs?
- rogerclark 16y agobecause for this purpose, you are all using "old" for "more knowledgeable and superior"
- benwerd 16y agoAw, man. I turned 32 on Friday, which is 224 in developer years, and have spent the last couple of days consoling myself that everything's fine, I'm not past it, etc etc. And now this. Thank you, Hacker News. Thank you so much. I am as old as dust and time and the fabric of the universe. Now I know how all those COBOL programmers felt.
- funthree 16y agoIf its any consolation I am only 24 and felt a bit old as well knowing entirely what was coming after clicking the link. Lets just say whoever posted the question is a newb :)
- edd 16y agoIf its any consolation I am only 22 and felt a bit old as well knowing entirely what was coming after clicking the link.
- redthrowaway 16y agoObligatory: http://thejokeshop.org/2008/12/as-useful-as-a-cobol-programmer/ http://thejokeshop.org/2008/12/as-useful-as-a-cobol-programm...
- tel 16y ago* It was actually eight thousand years later, not the year 2000. Technology had advanced to such a degree that everyone had virtual reality interfaces which allowed them to contact anyone else on the planet.* This joke needs to be adjusted for the times. It should say 10 years not 8000.
- pwelch 16y agohttp://abstrusegoose.com/323 http://abstrusegoose.com/323 The last line: "COBOL is forever" gets me every time. =)
- erikpukinskis 16y agoThis thread had the opposite effect on me. I see all these "old folks" responses and think "now we get to see who the REAL rockstars are." When we're talking about 100 core cell phones and Clojure, in many ways the teenagers and the old hands are on more equal footing. Then someone busts out "and then I reverse engineered the tape drive with an oscillascope" and I'm like.... "Respect." I look forward to one day being the old hack who can say shit like that.
- maxklein 16y agoIn 20 years people won't understand CDs either, or why people would carry around plastic as big as 3 iPods to play 12 songs.
- redthrowaway 16y agoIn 20 years, people won't understand iPods, or why you would have to physically carry around data anyway.
- maxklein 16y agoHow would they play music when jogging or in the train then?
- moe 16y agoEar-implant with wireless streaming, probably.
- redthrowaway 16y agoI don't think it's unreasonable to expect ubiquitous wireless connectivity of one kind or another, and cloud storage. As for what form the device might take, who knows? It would have been pretty hard to predict smartphones in 1990; I expect further consolidation of devices, but have no idea what they'll look like.
- whatusername 16y agoDo you live in a major US city or Small European or Asian Country? Look at remote places in Canada or Australia. Local data caching is important.
- redthrowaway 16y agoI'd agree that caching is important, but when, realistically, would you not have any sort of wireless access in 20 years? Driving? Many cars these days have hard drives; it's easy to see that becoming more prevalent as storage gets even cheaper. The people designing mobile devices aren't worried about a single farmer in the middle of Saskatchewan. Cell phone providers didn't even bother with the whole of Saskatchewan for a number of years. If you can get a cell signal, you can get streaming media, or at least you will be able to. I don't see that being much of a problem.
- forinti 16y agoI must be a ancient, because I remember having to identify which side of the floppy I wanted to use! On the BBC Micro, the first drive had sides 0 and 2; the second drive had sides 1 and 3. And I was lucky to have two drives. I only saw HDs on magazines.
- jeffmould 16y agoHow about having to notch the other side of a single sided floppy to make it double sided. Or even having to put tape over a notch to make it read-only. I remember those little black pieces of tape that came with a box of floppies to make the read-only.
- ck2 16y agoI finally threw away my Model II 8-inch floppies a few years ago. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Okona-GfhR-TRS-80.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Okona-GfhR-TRS-80.jpg One day you'll have to take your kids to a museum to show them a CRT monitor (and they will have to take their kids to a museum to show them an incandescent light bulb).
- Maro 16y agoI'm turning 30 in April and sometimes I feel like an old dog. Nevertheless, the article made my day, I can't stop laughing over it and the comments, esp. the Penny Arcade link in this thread. Cheers =)
- skbohra123 16y agoNever, this would happen again that one technology/company would have such huge effect.
- torpor 16y agoHeh heh, this is hilarious .. Aniquity is a technological effect I'll never quite get used to .. Which is why I'm waiting with baited breath for the release of this thing: http://retromaster.wordpress.com/2011/01/11/cumulus-firmware-progress/ http://retromaster.wordpress.com/2011/01/11/cumulus-firmware... So I can really have something cool about computers to teach my 3-year old in a decade or so! :)
- RiderOfGiraffes 16y agoMy first computer didn't have disk drives at all - it used standard audio cassette tapes in standard audio cassette machines. I remember feeding the audio into an oscilliscope and reverse engineering the format used on the tape, then writing Z80 machine code (I didn't have an assember - I wrote actual hex opcodes and fed them into a program I wrote that read hex and poked the values into memory) to create tapes that then overwrote the stack and booted me into a machine code monitor. Then I wrote a Forth operating system. This was on a 16KB machine (I had the expansion pack) with a 1.7MHz Z80. Fun days. I still have the machine and its complete circuit diagram. I should get it out again, but then again, I don't have time: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2095231 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2095231
- rasur 16y agoSounds a bit like you had a Sinclair ZX80. Been there, done that ;)
- RiderOfGiraffes 16y agoTRS-80 Model I: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80
- drndown2007 16y agoI loved the TRS-80. We had some in my Jr High. We had an assignment to create some large ASCII art via hundreds of print statements and then print it out on the dot matrix printer.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- bad_user 16y agoI also had a home computer featuring a Z80 CPU, compatible with the Sinclair. But this one also featured a 3.5" floppy drive: http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=911 http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=... Sadly I sold it to a friend at some point.
- tintin 16y agoAlso a nice reminder to expect the unexpected in your work. I bet most programs back then trusted there was a disk in A. Now installers are relying on the existence of C. But what if you boot from USB? The '/' solution is a more elegant one in this case.
- RyanMcGreal 16y ago> "Please Insert Disk 13" OH GOD WHERE IS DISK 13, I CAN'T FIND DISK 13. - Jeff 16 hours ago I have exactly this memory as well. My first computer was a Compaq Deskpro Portable. It had a 5.25" floppy drive and a 40 MB hard disk. It was an embarrassment of riches - how could you ever fill up 40 whole megabytes? Between that and my custom AUTOEXEC.BAT file, I was set. As it happens, I still have most of the files I created on that original computer, and can even run my old BASIC programs using DOSBox on Ubuntu. I had to copy the files via 5.25" floppies to another computer that had a 5.25" and a 3.5" floppy drive; and from there on 3.5" floppies to yet another computer that had a 3.5" floppy drive and a CD drive.
- ghostDancer 16y agoWell windows 1.0 were only [1] 5 5.25" floppies and [2] 2 for MS-DOS and another one for write (the grandfather of word). I think i need a drive to try them again ;-) . [1] http://twitpic.com/39kbjz http://twitpic.com/39kbjz [2] http://twitpic.com/39kaxd http://twitpic.com/39kaxd
- ikitat 16y agoI recall Slackware Linux requiring 13 disks
- robin_reala 16y agoMy younger brother typed format c: instead of format a: once on my Dad’s laptop that he was borrowing to do homework - he was up all night reinstalling Windows 95 from 26 floppys.
- geedee77 16y agoMy older brother, when learning assembly, needed a memory address to write to on the hard disk of my Dad's business computer. Sadly he chose the first one as he hadn't discovered the File Allocation Table at that point. My Dad wasn't best pleased, even though technically the data was still on the disk!
- duffbeer703 16y agoI had an in-person old fogey moment when we were going down geek memory lane talking about modem banks and rotary dial phone. The intern didn't know what a telephone modem was and had never seen a rotary dial phone!
- hackermom 16y agoThis gave me a good laughter, and I'm only 30.
- Steve0 16y agoMakes you wonder, when will the floppy be discarded as the icon for 'save'?
- wardrox 16y agoMaybe when something comes along to replace "save"? With the steadily increasing amount of software that auto-saves without you noticing, maybe soon we just wont need to "save" anything. It'll just happen.
- bergie 16y agoGNOME has been using a picture of a hard drive for quite a while now: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gnome-document-save.svg http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gnome-document-save.s... Though that may also become antiquated with SSDs and cloud storage :-)
- maguay 16y agoThere's only a handful of apps on iOS that include a save button, and even of those that do include one, DocsToGo is the only one I can think of that uses a floppy for a save icon. It might be gone before you know it ... though I'd guess you'll still see it in Windows in 2020 or beyond ;)
- brc 16y agoMy guess is never. The universal train icon for signs has a funnel and a cow-catcher, and it's a long time since a train looked anything like that. Same goes for the universal sign for telephone - nothing like a modern cordless handset. We can already seen this in action as the icon for 'mp3' on signs looks like a first-gen ipod. Already no players (even ipods) look like that, but I think it will stick around for a long time. Some things get stuck as icons and the original meaning is lost with the sands of time. Once the icon is assigned to a meaning for most people, it sticks. There's no reason to update the icon, even if it no longer represents the object, because everyone agrees on the meaning.
- michael_dorfman 16y agoI recently bought my 13-year-old daughter a laptop with 8 gig of RAM. When I was 13, I was lucky enough to get a computer with 8 kb of RAM (and one of the 8 went to the operating system, so there were 7167 bytes free.) There aren't too many areas where one generation translates to a million-fold improvement.
- madaxe 16y agoYour daughter had better be using that 8 gig for something useful. 8k should be enough for anybody!
- michael_dorfman 16y agoEvery now and then I regale her (and her sisters) with tales about life in the olden days, when if you wanted to change the channel on the TV, you had to get up and walk across the frickin' room! Now excuse me, I need to chase some pesky kids off my lawn.
- Luyt 16y agoLet me guess, did you have a PET-2001?
- sbt 16y agoNow I just feel old
- bane 16y ago"Once upon a time ... technologies of the past." "Il était une fois... les technologies du passé." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdSHeKfZG7c http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdSHeKfZG7c This video made me feel tremendously old.
- el_chapitan 16y agoThis makes me remember when the first iMac came out (apparently in '98) and just broke my brain by not having a floppy drive. http://www.businessweek.com/1998/36/b3594050.htm http://www.businessweek.com/1998/36/b3594050.htm
- motters 16y agoAs far as I remember the A and B drives were used for floppy disks. In the olden days home computers didn't have hard drives, and typically either had a single or dual floppy drive. With a dual drive you could do fancy things like make backup copies, without having to repeatedly store data to RAM and swap source and destination floppies. In the 1980s home computers typically didn't have enough memory to store the entire contents of a floppy disk in RAM, which made the process of creating backups irksome if you didn't have a dual drive. If you've only started using Windows based computers within the last five years then the missing A and B drives may seem mysterious. Floppy drives started disappearing from first laptops and then desktop machines in the early 2000s.
- cmiles74 16y agoI was working at an Apple reseller when the iMac came out. Part of our sales pitch was to try to convince everyone who bought an iMac that they needed a USB floppy drive to go with it. Everyone was convinced that people needed that floppy drive. http://www.osnews.com/story/18/The_iMac_and_the_Floppy_Drive_A_Conspiracy_Theory http://www.osnews.com/story/18/The_iMac_and_the_Floppy_Drive...
- sp332 16y agoFloppy disks were also used in home computers that had hard drives. Before it was popular to have local networks, and before the internet was commonplace, sneakernet was the best way to share files among computers. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Sneakernet https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Sneakernet
- Unosolo 16y agoFew people on superuser.com seem to mention that B:\ was always reserved even on a single floppy system so that it was possible to copy data from one floppy onto another: 1. Insert source disk 2. Type copy a:\. b:\ 3. The system will read a chunk of data from a:\ then say: Please insert disk B: and press any key to continue... 4. You'd swap the disks, press a key, and the system will write the chunk of data and say Please insert disk A: and press any key to continue... This would go on and on and on... Anyone remembers installing Win95 and the number of 1.44MB 3.5" floppies it came on? 26! And once you got to about disk no. 13 it would start asking you to insert seemingly random disk numbers every minute or so... Or how about getting to disk number 17 and being told that the installation is corrupt, start over.... errrr.......
- TimJYoung 16y agoRe; Win95 - Yes, and I still have them somewhere in my attic. I even have the original Windows 95 beta floppies. :-) Another one that was a doozie was VC++ for Windows 3.1 - it was about 13 or 14 3.5" floppies also.
- jeza 16y ago> "I think it shows how obsolete these things have become that the 'new generation' have no experience of them :-) Makes me feel old – Andy Paton" Yet we had to put up with this inferior technology for so long. I remember people were still running around with floppy disks at high school in the late 90s/early 00s (it was easily 20 year old technology by that time) and I started using the internet for transferring my files. So much that I have never purchased a USB memory device.
- rick_2047 16y agoInteresting. After the first few thoughts like "This can't be happening I am only 19" and "this guy is either dumb or 6" my next thought was "What would be the question that would make me feel really old when I am in my 50s"? The effect this question has on people is because they remember some information which most of the users today don't know as they have never used that technology. So what technology of today will become so obsolete that you would remember your age?
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- antidaily 16y agoJeff Atwood tweeted this yesterday with the comment "want to feel old?"
- raganwald 16y agoFloppies!? Kids these days. My High School had an actual, physical computer, a Data General minicomputer. We used teletypes that printed on a continuous roll of cheap paper. The computer used removable media: 12" removable "Diablo" 5MB hard drive platters. One had four user basic on it, one had single user basic, and one was locked away with the software for grading students. Memory management was primitive: BASIC ran in RAM, and if you used single user basic, you had 4x the RAM and therefore room for 4x the program. When swapping drives, you had to boot the computer by toggling the CPU's three instructions into the front panel. I wrote a massive Star Trek adventure game in single user basic. Friends would actually creep into the lab overnight so they could play by themselves.
- jdee 16y agoLuxury! I used to have to snip endless chads out of punched cards to represent the very zeroes and ones of the program i was writing! Thanks to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1a1wHxTyo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1a1wHxTyo
- JonnieCache 16y agoGo for the original: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eDaSvRO9xA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eDaSvRO9xA 1948's finest.
- lamby 16y agoYou were lucky. When I was a lad there were only 3 Yorkshiremen in that sketch.
- iuguy 16y ago3! Paradise! We never had 3 Yorkshiremen, we had to make do with a pair of pythons, a goodie and Doctor Frankensteins' henchman. And we didn't even have an abacus to program on, we had to make do with fingers and toes and pretend they were turing compliant. And some of us didn't even have toes or fingers!
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- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- rman666 16y agoMy first personal computer was an Ohio Scientific C24P. I had to load BASIC into RAM using a 300 baud cassette tape. Beat that, ya youngsters!
- maguay 16y agoI'm in my early twenties, and one of my earliest memories of computers was my Dad trying to get a book of stamps out of the floppy drive on his Amiga. Plus, who could forget installing Windows 95 from, what was it, 20 floppies? And now we buy 1Tb drives like it's nothing...
- EGreg 16y agoThey used to be used for floppy disks and other such things! In fact they started in DOS. Ah, remember the days? I do... b because I'm 27. Anyone here started programming with QBasic?
- JonnieCache 16y ago>Anyone here started programming with QBasic? Guilty. Did a fair bit of that. Although I think before that I was hacking batch files featuring the CHOICE command and firing them from config.sys in order to build a menu to allow me to chose from among the many different DOS memory management setups needed to play various games. Ahhhh, Dune II. Thank god those days are gone to be honest. I'd pretty glad I don't have to deal with IRQ numbers any more.
- nollidge 16y agoI ate QBasic for breakfast for a couple years. Rewrote SNAKE.BAS with SCREEN 13 graphics. Wrote a slot machine program based on the one in "Absolute Beginner's Guide to QBasic" (IIRC - Google is no help, but I remember it had a neon green cover with a safari adventure guy). Rewrote a loan amortization program that my dad had originally written in Wang BASIC (and even then he only had a printout). I have a soft spot in my heart for QBasic. As DOS-based procedural languages go, it has of the best editing environments, fantastic integrated help, and hits that sweet spot of making simple things easy and hard things possible that never outgrew my learning curve. Contrary to popular opinion, I never had to "unlearn" anything once I graduated to modern languages.
- edw519 16y agoThe possibilities are endless (27 second video)... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3O3HdjOfsI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3O3HdjOfsI
- jadedoto 16y agoI miss going to class with a floppy and knowing it was corrupted, get an extension on the assignment. I am only 20... are there really computer users out there unfamiliar with floppies? I keep 5.25" drives around for fun and I still have Windows 95 on 3.25"ers :)
- lesterbuck 16y agoWhere did floppy disks come from, Daddy? I'm old enough to remember the 8" floppy disk that was invented by IBM to ... wait for it ... boot System 360! I think they had CE (customer engineer, i.e., repair guy) diagnostics, firmware, etc. on them, as the little bit I actually saw one being used, it was during maintenance.
- snorkel 16y agoDon't even get us old timers started on how we used to mount CD drives. Editing AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS and making sure the sound card driver loaded after so it wouldn't steal the same interrupt, and sometimes D:\ would appear to be there but you couldn't read it ... ah, my back hurts! Get off my lawn!
- runjake 16y agoThe Timex-Sinclair 1000 was like my 3rd or 4th computer. End of contest (hopefully all the real PDP folks are long dead, right?). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Sinclair_1000 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Sinclair_1000 2K RAM, 3 MHZ CPU (much faster than the .9 MHZ of my TRS-80 Color Computer. Yes, it didn't even have 1 MHZ). And yes, I did a lot of programming on that keyboard.
- cadr 16y agoA VAX 11/750 was my 4th or so computer. Of course, that was after an Apple II clone, and C64, and a 286. They were scrapping it and I (my high school, but really me) ended up with it. Can't remember if I ever got it working properly, but it was really impressive. It had been used in an NMR setup and had really neat vacuum tubes to do connect to that.
- runjake 16y agoScrapped doesn't count, if so I have some 1960s gear. I also have a bit of nostalgic fondness for VAX & VMS as I spent my early computing career working on it (along with the full range of DEC gear). I'd never want to go back, though.
- run4yourlives 16y agoI feel so old.
- wallflower 16y agoAlso, not everyone was cool enough to have both A: and B: And tape drives transfer speeds were 300? baud. Most people can read way faster and some can type faster. I have many memories of working late in school labs, feeling that awful feeling when the sky outside gets light as it literally dawns on you you've been there all night, making backups on multiple floppy disks as you go...Bathed in the fluorescents
- haberman 16y agoWhen I was learning DOS on my dad's computer at work (IBM XT), I knew how to use the "cd" command to change into a directory. Unfortunately I didn't know how to get back out of a directory ("cd \") so I would restart the computer whenever I needed to get back to the root directory. Ah, those were the days.
- wizardishungry 16y agoI believe that I used to change drive letters to get around this but it may have eventually remembered the last directory when you changed back.
- isomorph 16y agoIn the style of one of those YouTube comments, "I'm 19 and I have used a floppy disk!!"
- nhebb 16y agoI just realized that I have a bunch of old 3.5" discs in my desk - even though I don't have a single system with a floppy drive anymore. I just cleared out a bunch of space in my hutch. Thanks HN!
- marckremers 16y agoThe fact that Windows still keeps this hierarchy is what stuns me the most. Why are they still silently referring to this technology in 2011?! It just boggles my mind. It's almost like keeping your floppy disks in your top drawer even though you haven't used them for 15 years. And won't. Ever.
- makeramen 16y agoNUMBER MUNCHERS! i miss that game
- jaspero 16y ago3.5" HD Floppies were awesome compared to non-HD.
- didip 16y agoBack in the floppy days, archive tools matter because it can cut down the number of disks. Cannot believe I still remember my old favorite: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARJ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARJ Screw pkzip. It always asked me to insert the first disk, again, last.
- rogerclark 16y agoThis guy obviously wrote this question to provoke this exact response from people. He's duped all of you into obsessing over nostalgia and thinking/saying you've got a leg up on "today's youngsters." Nobody who asks this question would need to go to a StackOverflow site to get it answered.
- radioactive21 16y agoGood times, I used to install windows 95 with 20 floppy disks!!!
- radioactive21 16y agoYou know what actually amazes me these days. I once had to explain this exact same question to someone and they were very interested in the answer. I remember back in the old days when I would bring up anything tech I got called a nerd and/or geek and it was the kind stuff you dont talk to normal people about. I got made fun of by people for talking about IRC channels and being on internet boards, back when they were command line. The weirdest change for me as been the acceptance of knowing about technology. Today if you dont know what the interent or a computer is you are consider old and out of date. Back then if you knew that stuff you were an outcast.
- beej71 16y agoIt's the same reason there's no Channel 1 on TV.
- mkramlich 16y agoThat's one of those questions that makes a guy feel old. I also remember 8" floppy disks first-hand. I was a kid, but still.
- elevenE 16y agoI'm in my late teens. Makes me feel old too :)
- jakemcgraw 16y agoWhen I installed Windows 95, it was off of 14 floppy disks, feels good man.
- pronik 16y agoWhat scares me about this question is that such easy and popular questions (and answers to them) mean a lot of karma points to all of the participants before it goes into community wiki mode, while folks who actually can google their problems (and spend time actually working instead of reloading StackOverflow every five seconds) have low scores, since the questions they ask are complicated and thus rarely answered and even more rarely popular.
- lostbit 16y agoI still have my MSX Hotbit with a 5 1/4 floppy disk extension. I had a lot fun with it in the past. Now I'm wondering what to do with it... At this time, I guess kids will find interesting that a computer must be attached to the TV so you can have a screen. Some love the typewriter, which prints at the same time you type!