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Nice article! So much great tech has been lost to aggressive business practices of entrenched companies it would have disrupted. The theme has been repeated..

by johnea 1y ago

Nice article! So much great tech has been lost to aggressive business practices of entrenched companies it would have disrupted. The theme has been repeated... repeatedly: VHS vs Beta being maybe the typically cited archetype of business model vs technical specs. To me the dominant example in the world today though, is that s/w engineers continue to use windows 8-( C:? Does anyone ever stop to think about the abstraction of a file system directory hierarchy? The whole point is to remove the specifics of the h/w implementing it, and provide a logical abstraction of nested "directories". Explicitly specifying drive "letters", is the opposite of that. The only reason it ever existed was because the primordial DOS didn't have the horsepower to manage something like a unix mount. But why do we still have it in 2025? Business triumphs over technology. One aspect of the article that didn't track my experience was the description of linux in 2015. By that point I had long ago settled onto the fluxbox window manager, because I didn't like the constant churn of "desktop environments". It all just seemed too much like windows. In 2025 I'm still using it, and it's still exactly the same, which to me is one of it's greatest features. Personally, I don't want the latest brainchild of some UI engineer at Canonical disrupting my workflow. This veto power of equity over technical possibility is the story of modern tech development. Cory Doctorow cites this 2014 article in his post today: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli... tl;dr US political policy making is 100% controlled by large financial equity stake holders. The support, for or against, a policy by the overwhelming majority of the population has a 0% effect. This is also true of corporate decisions. "Innovation" is pursued if and only if it benefits equity, regardless of potential advantages to users, or the progress of the tech itself.

DerekL 1y ago
Beta wasn't better than VHS. It was better at a given tape speed, but the cassettes were smaller, so you'd have to use a lower speed to get the same recording time.
- acegopher 1y ago
  And you couldn't fit a whole movie on a single Betamax tape. That alone was a reason for VHS's acendancy.
avidphantasm 1y ago
Windows NT had the ability do away with drive letters since maybe the beginning; I was certainly running NT 4 and Windows 2000 like this. The problem I think is that every legacy app would instantly break if they couldn’t use drive letters and Microsoft doesn’t care enough to prioritize migrating away from drive letters. This, I believe, is a great example of MS having no taste (as Steve Jobs pointed out).
II2II 1y ago
There were reasons for drive letters. It was common to have floppy-only systems back in the day, so you were switching out floppies for everything from running software to accessing your data. The drive letter was the most meaningful way to identify where you were looking for that data. Later on, when hard drives were common, people still used things like floppies and optical media. Drive letters were still more meaningful in that context. Drive letters started losing their relevance with USB mass storage (especially when the media was the device), and are minimally relevant today (when external storage is far more likely to be on the network). The lack of proper abstraction sucks when you have multiple hard drives, but I'm pretty sure that Windows has taken care of that from several angles. Those features simply aren't used often. (And, since I'm not a Windows user, take that bit with a grain of salt.)
- kstrauser 1y ago
  No way. AmigaDOS in 1985 referred to all disks either by device name (like DH0: for Disk, Hard, number 0 or DF1: for Disk, Floppy, number 1) or label (like "Workbench:" or "Work:" or "Defender of the Crown 2:"). If a program tried to open "Some App 2:datafile", the OS would prompt you to insert the disk named "Some App 2". Drive letters were a poor alternative even way back then.
  - LocalH 1y ago
    It was also very handy that you could arbitrarily assign names to folders and have them be treated across the system as a volume name. Got some non-copyprotected software that expects to run from the volume name of the floppy? Copy the contents of the disk into a folder, assign the volume name of the floppy to that folder, and it will most likely just work. If it's a self-booting disk you may also need to copy the contents of some system folders into your actual system folders (c, libs, devs, etc) but other than that, with regards to the filesystem, volume assigns were very powerful (and in OS 2.0 and up you could also chain these assigns across different folders)
    - kstrauser 1y ago
      Oh man, those were such nice features. And again, we had all this while DOS was still screwing around with drive letters.
p_ing 1y ago
C:\ is the abstraction over the Win32 file namespace \\?\C\. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/naming-a-file#namespaces https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/namin... And of course, NT can do mount points.

by johnea 1y ago

DerekL 1y ago

Beta wasn't better than VHS. It was better at a given tape speed, but the cassettes were smaller, so you'd have to use a lower speed to get the same recording time.

acegopher 1y ago
And you couldn't fit a whole movie on a single Betamax tape. That alone was a reason for VHS's acendancy.

avidphantasm 1y ago

Windows NT had the ability do away with drive letters since maybe the beginning; I was certainly running NT 4 and Windows 2000 like this. The problem I think is that every legacy app would instantly break if they couldn’t use drive letters and Microsoft doesn’t care enough to prioritize migrating away from drive letters. This, I believe, is a great example of MS having no taste (as Steve Jobs pointed out).

II2II 1y ago

There were reasons for drive letters. It was common to have floppy-only systems back in the day, so you were switching out floppies for everything from running software to accessing your data. The drive letter was the most meaningful way to identify where you were looking for that data. Later on, when hard drives were common, people still used things like floppies and optical media. Drive letters were still more meaningful in that context. Drive letters started losing their relevance with USB mass storage (especially when the media was the device), and are minimally relevant today (when external storage is far more likely to be on the network). The lack of proper abstraction sucks when you have multiple hard drives, but I'm pretty sure that Windows has taken care of that from several angles. Those features simply aren't used often. (And, since I'm not a Windows user, take that bit with a grain of salt.)

kstrauser 1y ago
No way. AmigaDOS in 1985 referred to all disks either by device name (like DH0: for Disk, Hard, number 0 or DF1: for Disk, Floppy, number 1) or label (like "Workbench:" or "Work:" or "Defender of the Crown 2:"). If a program tried to open "Some App 2:datafile", the OS would prompt you to insert the disk named "Some App 2". Drive letters were a poor alternative even way back then.
- LocalH 1y ago
  It was also very handy that you could arbitrarily assign names to folders and have them be treated across the system as a volume name. Got some non-copyprotected software that expects to run from the volume name of the floppy? Copy the contents of the disk into a folder, assign the volume name of the floppy to that folder, and it will most likely just work. If it's a self-booting disk you may also need to copy the contents of some system folders into your actual system folders (c, libs, devs, etc) but other than that, with regards to the filesystem, volume assigns were very powerful (and in OS 2.0 and up you could also chain these assigns across different folders)
  - kstrauser 1y ago
    Oh man, those were such nice features. And again, we had all this while DOS was still screwing around with drive letters.

p_ing 1y ago

C:\ is the abstraction over the Win32 file namespace \\?\C\. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/naming-a-file#namespaces https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/namin... And of course, NT can do mount points.