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Why the hard drive is called C
- version_five 5y agoThis makes me feel really old
- pjmlp 5y agoSame here, started with Timex 2068, now realizing this basic stuff needs to be clarified.
- YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago"Grampa, what are 'floppies'"? "Oh, that's what we used before we had hard disks". "Hard disks? What's that"? "Well, it's a kind of permanent data storage for computers". "..." "..." "Grampa, what's 'computers'"? Feel bettter now? :P
- cout 5y agoDo you remember having to explain to people that soft shell 5.25" disks are floppies and hard shell 3.5" disks are also floppies, not hard disks?
- YeGoblynQueenne 5y agoBefore my time :)
- dwd 5y agoSure does. I have college-age kids who possibly never used a floppy disk. It was all usb sticks and CDs when they went through school.
- greenyoda 5y agoI've used both the original MS/DOS and IBM's CMS, but never made the connection between both of them using drive letters. It just seemed like a natural way of concisely referring to disk devices. In current Windows systems without floppy drives, you can map A: and B: to network drives with the NET USE command, just like any other unused drive letter.
- cout 5y agoIf you map A: but not B: do you still get B: mapped to the same drive, as you would in a computer with only one floppy drive, or does that magic only apply to drives that hold removable media?
- zabzonk 5y ago> I've used both the original MS/DOS and IBM's CMS, but never made the connection between both of them using drive letters. It just seemed like a natural way of concisely referring to disk devices. I've used both of them too and in the case of CMS the one thing I didn't like about it was the lack of tree-structured directories. You couldn't easily explore the filesystem without them. Also, if I remember correctly, the drives addressed by letters were virtual drives - certainly our IBM 4381s did not have 26 physical drives :) Still, I wrote a lot of useful software in CMS, so perhaps it's not that important.
- greenyoda 5y agoI think CMS finally added tree structured directories, but it was after I was using it regularly so I never used them much. > Also, if I remember correctly, the drives addressed by letters were virtual drives In most cases they were virtual drives (attached to your virtual machine) that were mapped to a set of contiguous cylinders on a physical drive. (But you could allocate a virtual drive that consisted of an entire physical drive if you wanted to, which could be useful if you wanted an entire device to be managed by some guest operating system that was running in a VM/370 virtual machine.)
- programmer_dude 5y agoA better question is why are hard drives still being assigned drive letters? Multiple "roots" in the file system hierarchy is just plain stupid. You need to special case your path navigation commands for for drive letters. (E.g. cd v/s cd /d). etc.
- zabzonk 5y ago> A better question is why are hard drives still being assigned drive letters? Backwards compatibility. I agree it is unfortunate.
- beardyw 5y agoI had an old Windows machine with 2 drives (C and D of course). I wanted to use it for Linux but keep the old system. I moved all of D into a directory on C, but obviously all the old paths would be wrong. But it turns out that tinkering with the registry I could declare the new folder as D! I wonder what would happen if you called it A or B?
- programmer_dude 5y agoLol, that's a slick way of working around this mess.
- richij 5y agoIt's not mandatory. You can tell Windows not to assign a letter to a new volume (but I wouldn't try to remove the assignment from C:). And you can mount new volumes under an empty directory, just like *nix. The best place to do this is in the Disk Management app. The easiest way to access it is via the Win+X menu.
- mrlonglong 5y agoUNCs are the best thing since sliced bread, and does exactly what you want. \\machine\c\your_folders \\machine\d\yet_more_folders
- 5y ago
- dusted 5y agoI didn't know people didn't know this (I'm assuming the article tells that drive a and b are for floppies?), so I've still learnt something.
- giuliomagnifico 5y agoProbably new users don’t know it. And who has always used Unix based system (like me) usually call the drives /dev/sda :-)
- dusted 5y agoI've used Linux primarily since Debian potato, but the great wizards have not yet convinced me that the tree, starting at the holy / and a system with binaries, their data and their libraries spread throughout the system is a wiser way than each partition an island, and each program living with all it needs in its own folder. I have heard the arguments but I have learned nothing.
- approxim8ion 5y agoEach program in Windows does not live with all its needs in its own folder though. Some store some of their stuff in the installation directory, others in AppData, others in ProgramData, others in the User's home folder (C:/<username/...) and so on.
- dusted 5y agoI've got lots of programs that are entirely self-contained and the folder can simply be moved to a new computer and it "just works", they include all the data files and dll's they want, and they keep their user-data under their own directory too, which is exactly how I want it for a _PERSONAL_ computer.
- approxim8ion 5y agoThat's fine. But it's not really a standard. Just an approach, and not one that is guaranteed to work unless that's an explicit goal for the program involved. Tbf, you can do the same thing on Linux with AppImages.
- harel 5y agoFor me drive A is forever df0:
- fdewnijfwg 5y agoThank you! It's a shame AmigaOS' volume system never caught on. It would have solved the problems the article describes re. drive letter assumptions: "Assign A: DH0:" - Problem solved! I feel really old now.
- ahonhn 5y agoI really miss how you could assign drive names to disks too, so you might have some reference to a file on a particular disk and it would prompt you to insert that specific disk (into any convenient floppy drive) and if you got the wrong disk it would know and ask you again. Otoh I don't miss all the swapping between the 5 floppies that SAS C compiler came on before I finally got my hands on a humongous 40 megabyte hard drive. Also remember how the drives would click every second to check if you had actually inserted anything and how there was some freeware anticlick program on one of the Fish disks that reconfigured to somehow work without the annoying clicky noise. (Or you could just feed it a disk). Fun times.
- Jaruzel 5y agoSo... recently I've started using a physical box running Debian for some retro computing work (dd'ing images etc.) and I have a need to use a USB floppy drive. I think there is some daemon running in the background trying to automount stuff, as the USB drive constantly clicks when empty just like the Amiga used to. Very irritating.
- fdewnijfwg 5y agoCould be. For the record, my USB drive (and I'm running Debian too), doesn't do that. Part of the desktop environment, perhaps?
- vincentpants 5y agoThis deeply unnerved me.
- hyperman1 5y agoThere used to be a weird trick here: Who says drive letters have to be letters? If you had more than 26 drives, msdos just took whatever was in the ascii table after Z: . This was easy to cause with network drives. Programs mostly just went with it unquestioningly. I don 't remember what happens if your drive letter itself is a backslash. A few years ago it was still possible to do stuff like subst ?: C:\somepath Then you had a drive ?: which was accepted by half of your programs but not the others. I don't have a win10 laying around so I can't test if this is still true today.
- Jaruzel 5y agoYes that still works under Windows 10/11. Useful if you are working in the command line, and have tools somewhere else that you are accessing (that are not in the PATH) and you get tired of typing the full path to the tools.
- xmcqdpt2 5y ago>A few years ago it was still possible to do stuff like > subst ?: C:\somepath >Then you had a drive ?: which was accepted by half of your programs but not the others. Neat! Like a Windows version of chroot? Can it be used to stop programs from accessing C?
- hyperman1 5y agoI don't think subst is a good idea for security purposes. You can't hide the original drive, some tools look right trough it, and UNC path names allow other ways. Windows has the concepts of window stations and sessions. One of these 2 is the namespace for drive letters, as it allows different rdp users to have their own network drives, and also give services their own security context . Take sysinternals winobj to look around. Maybe you can build something chrootlike out of it, I dont really know, I am a bit out of my depth here.
- errcorrectcode 5y agoMuhaha. As a DoS of DOS: x:\> copy c:\config.sys CLOCK$ Also special DOS filenames: CON PRN AUX NUL {COM,LPT}[1-9] https://superuser.com/questions/1362080/which-characters-are-invalid-for-an-ms-dos-filename https://superuser.com/questions/1362080/which-characters-are... Print autoexec.bat to the dot matrix printer on LPT1? x:\> copy autoexec.bat lpt1 x:\> Create a file called foo.txt without an editor? x:\> copy con foo.txt whatever whatever whatever whatever ^Z<ENTER> x:\> A social DoS of any machine with BASIC or similar. 10 INPUT "Press any key to continue..."; $X 20 GOTO 10 When good floppies go bad: General Failure reading drive A:\. Abort, Ignore, Retry, Fail?
- Jaruzel 5y agoFun sidebar fact: Under MS-DOS you can't go higher than E: without issuing the LASTDRIVE=x command in config.sys (Where x is the maximum drive letter you want to go up to)
- egberts1 5y agoOn a clear disk, you can seek forever - forever anonymous