3 ms·

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 c

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. 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 ago
If 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 ago
  I 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.)

3 ms·

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 c

by greenyoda 5y ago

cout 5y ago
If 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 ago
  I 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.)