5 ms·

Oh bless you and your youngsterness. A and B, by convention, were reserved for floppy drives and C was typically the first hard drive.

HPsquared 11mo ago
Hard drives were a luxury.
- prerok 11mo ago
  While original IBM PCs indeed may not have had HDDs, it did become a standard for PC XT, as early as 1983. Only the cheapest version were without a HDD by the end of the 1980s.
  - actionfromafar 11mo ago
    Many clones came without a HDD.
    - prerok 11mo ago
      Sure, I can imagine that. My first contact with PCs was in 1988 and they all had HDDs and were definitely not "IBM PC" but clones. That said, that's just my experience so YMMV.
      - pdonis 11mo ago
        My first PC, bought in late 1986, was a Leading Edge Model D, with two 360K floppy drives and no hard drive. I wrote a script to put COMMAND.COM and some other key files on a RAM disk on boot so I didn't have to keep the DOS floppy in the A: drive all the time. IIRC they had come out with a model that had a 20 MB hard drive but it was more than I could afford. MIT, where I was at school then, had some IBM PC XTs with 10 MB hard drives, but most of their computer resources were time-sharing DEC VAX machines. You could go to one of several computer labs to get on a terminal, or even dial into them--I did the latter from my PC (the one above) using a 2400 baud modem, which was fast for the time.
        jasomill 11mo ago
        Reminds me of a silly thing that happened when I was a freshman in high school, ca. 1992. We had a dumb "computer literacy" class taught in an computer lab full of PS/2 Model 25s with no hard drives, and were each issued a bootable floppy disk containing both Microsoft Works and our assignment files (word processing documents, spreadsheets, etc.), which we turned in at the end of class for grading. We started Works in the usual way, by typing "works" at the MS-DOS prompt. One day, out of boredom, I added "PROMPT Password:" to AUTOEXEC.BAT on my disk, changing the DOS prompt from "A:\>" to "Password:" when booted from my disk. Two days later, I got called into the dean's office, where the instructor demanded to know how I used my disk to "hack the network" — a network that, up until this point, I didn't even know existed, as the lab computers weren't connected to anything but power — and "lock me out of my computer", and threatened suspension unless and until I revealed the password. After a few minutes trying to explain that no password existed to a "computer literacy" instructor who clearly had no idea what either AUTOEXEC.BAT or the DOS prompt was, nor why booting a networked computer from a potentially untrustworthy floppy disk was a terrible idea, I finally gave in. "Fine. The password is works. Can I go now?"
        tracker1 11mo ago
        Those 10mb full-height mfm drives were so slow... you could literally turn the computer on... go make yourself something to drink, finish your first cup, pour a second and you'd be getting the to DOS prompt right around the time it finished booting. The irony, it was actually faster doublespaced/stacked.
      - int_19h 11mo ago
        Keep in mind that a lot of this depends on the location. In Russia, we had class full of IBM PCs without hard drives in school - you had to juggle floppies - and that was early 90s. And that was a fancy school.
  - layer8 11mo ago
    By the end of the 1980s, a lot of years had passed, and you’d buy an AT instead of an XT.
keitmo 11mo ago
On systems with a single floppy, drives A: and B: were two logical drives mapped to the same physical drive. This enabled you to (tediously) copy files from one diskette to another.
- dmurray 11mo ago
  I don't recall this, and I do recall running something like "diskcopy A: A:" to do that operation.
  - pxx 11mo ago
    phantom drive B is explicitly mentioned in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive_letter_assignment#Order_of_assignment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive_letter_assignment#Order_... the linked source checks out. diskcopy will also do this for you if you give it source = dest.
nopechief 11mo ago
[dead]

HPsquared 11mo ago

Hard drives were a luxury.

prerok 11mo ago
While original IBM PCs indeed may not have had HDDs, it did become a standard for PC XT, as early as 1983. Only the cheapest version were without a HDD by the end of the 1980s.
- actionfromafar 11mo ago
  Many clones came without a HDD.
  - prerok 11mo ago
    Sure, I can imagine that. My first contact with PCs was in 1988 and they all had HDDs and were definitely not "IBM PC" but clones. That said, that's just my experience so YMMV.
    - pdonis 11mo ago
      My first PC, bought in late 1986, was a Leading Edge Model D, with two 360K floppy drives and no hard drive. I wrote a script to put COMMAND.COM and some other key files on a RAM disk on boot so I didn't have to keep the DOS floppy in the A: drive all the time. IIRC they had come out with a model that had a 20 MB hard drive but it was more than I could afford. MIT, where I was at school then, had some IBM PC XTs with 10 MB hard drives, but most of their computer resources were time-sharing DEC VAX machines. You could go to one of several computer labs to get on a terminal, or even dial into them--I did the latter from my PC (the one above) using a 2400 baud modem, which was fast for the time.
      - jasomill 11mo ago
        Reminds me of a silly thing that happened when I was a freshman in high school, ca. 1992. We had a dumb "computer literacy" class taught in an computer lab full of PS/2 Model 25s with no hard drives, and were each issued a bootable floppy disk containing both Microsoft Works and our assignment files (word processing documents, spreadsheets, etc.), which we turned in at the end of class for grading. We started Works in the usual way, by typing "works" at the MS-DOS prompt. One day, out of boredom, I added "PROMPT Password:" to AUTOEXEC.BAT on my disk, changing the DOS prompt from "A:\>" to "Password:" when booted from my disk. Two days later, I got called into the dean's office, where the instructor demanded to know how I used my disk to "hack the network" — a network that, up until this point, I didn't even know existed, as the lab computers weren't connected to anything but power — and "lock me out of my computer", and threatened suspension unless and until I revealed the password. After a few minutes trying to explain that no password existed to a "computer literacy" instructor who clearly had no idea what either AUTOEXEC.BAT or the DOS prompt was, nor why booting a networked computer from a potentially untrustworthy floppy disk was a terrible idea, I finally gave in. "Fine. The password is works. Can I go now?"
      - tracker1 11mo ago
        Those 10mb full-height mfm drives were so slow... you could literally turn the computer on... go make yourself something to drink, finish your first cup, pour a second and you'd be getting the to DOS prompt right around the time it finished booting. The irony, it was actually faster doublespaced/stacked.
    - int_19h 11mo ago
      Keep in mind that a lot of this depends on the location. In Russia, we had class full of IBM PCs without hard drives in school - you had to juggle floppies - and that was early 90s. And that was a fancy school.
- layer8 11mo ago
  By the end of the 1980s, a lot of years had passed, and you’d buy an AT instead of an XT.

keitmo 11mo ago

On systems with a single floppy, drives A: and B: were two logical drives mapped to the same physical drive. This enabled you to (tediously) copy files from one diskette to another.

dmurray 11mo ago
I don't recall this, and I do recall running something like "diskcopy A: A:" to do that operation.
- pxx 11mo ago
  phantom drive B is explicitly mentioned in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive_letter_assignment#Order_of_assignment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive_letter_assignment#Order_... the linked source checks out. diskcopy will also do this for you if you give it source = dest.

nopechief 11mo ago

[dead]