14 ms·
What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for?
- Jugurtha 13y agoAwww, that is an adorable question :) I think in DefCon 18, Gordon "Fyodor" Lyon was talking about using Lua in Nmap. He said that the description mentioned that all of it and the doc could fit in a floppy disk.. And then he said "For the younger audience, a floppy disk is.." at which point the audience exploded in laughter. I'm 26 now, but my oldest brother is 18 years older than me and almost all of us in the family are engineers so I had different technologies around the house. (Not old enough to see "drum memory", though).
- return0 13y agoOMG, i'm getting too old.
- etfb 13y agoI came here to say that. In fact, bugger it, I don't care about originality! I'm going to say it too! Oh gods, I'm so old.
- atonse 13y agoYikes, me too! Although the first realization was when I heard Aerosmith on the oldies radio station.
- einhverfr 13y agoYou know when I saw punchcards first, they were already a somewhat bygone relic of ages past. But I used floppy disks for a long time. That someone would ask this question today, never having seen a computer with a floppy disk... Yeah I feel old....
- etfb 13y agoYou want to know old? I'll tell you old. I just downloaded a copy (never mind where from) of Borland Pascal 7.0, the last version of Turbo Pascal for MSDOS. I have my own legal copy, with 5¼" disks, but no disk drives. But I also have a program I wrote in the mid-1980s that still has some users, and I've wondered for a long time what would happen if I needed to make changes to it. Now, thanks to DOSbox, I can run that entire programming environment on my Linux box and... probably do nothing with it, but at least it's there...
- einhverfr 13y agoI have downloaded C64 software I have legally to run on Frodo.....
- IgorPartola 13y agoI am only 27! Why is this happening?!
- dpratt 13y agoJust wait - in another two or three years, you will suddenly not be able to be trusted with meaningful architectural decisions, you will be looked down upon as too slow, and your years of knowledge will be ignored because clearly you don't have anything to offer.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- ericcumbee 13y agoglad it's not just me
- glhaynes 13y agoI think this was literally the first piece of "computer knowledge" I ever learned.
- marcosdumay 13y agoThat means you missed all the fun with k7 tapes?
- demallien 13y agowhich for those that don't speak French translates to "cassette" tapes (ka - sept)...
- tshile 13y agoThat's exactly how I felt when reading the question :\
- RexRollman 13y agoI know how you feel. My ten year old daughter did not realize you could network computers together with a cable. To her, everything is networked wirelessly.
- chrislomax 13y agoWhen I was clearing out a cupboard the other day, my Son found an old cassette tape, he then proceeded to ask me what it was! I'm pretty sure in 20 more years we may see the same for CD ROMS or DVDs. This particular post makes me feel so old though and I'm only 30 in a couple of weeks. I remember buying Doom years ago and when I got the box it jangled round from all the discs inside of it. I also remember when the first 24x speed CD drives came out, this is when hard drives were too expensive to load a full game on to so CD speed was important so your game didn't buffer as much. Kids these days with their solid state iPads and 3D games consoles. Blurgh
- snorkel 13y agoDon't copy that floppy, grandpa.
- SeanDav 13y agoA friend of my Father's was a mainframe guru, back in the day, and he told us about "cylinder" hard drives that would take several hours to power down because the torsional stress on them would get too high if slowed down too quickly. Also tape drives that were spinning so quickly they could be dangerous. Sounds almost like heavy engineering!
- adestefan 13y agoI remember the time someone thought they'd save money by buying cheap paper for the high speed IBM 6400 line printer. The print head moved so fast it just shredded the paper into a fine dust that caked in every internal part. It sucked cleaning that out.
- btilly 13y agoI am reminded of http://www.penzba.co.uk/GreybeardStories/TheBlackTeam.html http://www.penzba.co.uk/GreybeardStories/TheBlackTeam.html.
- pfarrell 13y agoSome of the most brilliant people I've worked with are satisfied by the work, without needing lots of self-promotion. "The Story of Mel" is both inspiring and humbling. A "real programmer" http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/mel.html http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/mel.html
- carloc 13y agoSenility poll: Did you know the answer to this question?
- mseepgood 13y agoSeriously?
- networked 13y agoThe drive letter B: is also used by BartPE [1] as the default for its RAM disk. In fact, I think every time but one I encountered a Windows-era PC that had a B: drive it was a RAM disk, not a floppy drive. [1] A bootable live Windows XP/Server 2003 environment. See http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/ http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/.
- mtrimpe 13y agoA: and B: were more relevant when PCs didn't have hard drives. Back then usually the OS would be on A and your current game/app would be on B. I still remember the first game that was soooo big it required both A and B, meaning you to take the OS boot disk out (which you of course always forgot to put back in after you were done.) Good thing I had a dad who soldered Philips' Apple ][ clone together when I was 2 so that I don't feel that old for knowing this ;)
- endgame 13y agoBart's work is fantastic. I just submitted his MODBOOT page, which taught me far too much about bootdisks and .BAT programming. Also its bootdrv.com is one of the smallest useful programs I've ever seen, clocking in at seven bytes.
- adestefan 13y agoI had to go digging for a 3.5" drive a couple months back because I found some floppies that had some college papers on them. I have a zip disk with some artwork, too. At one point I had a SCSI zip drive and an Adaptec controller for it, but I have no idea where they're at now.
- powertower 13y agoAdaptec 2940 FTW!
- rayiner 13y agoIt's funny to talk about the 20 year old hackers who didn't ever have the experience of installing Word Perfect 5.x from 30-40 floppies, but let me tell you that those kids are going to feel just as old pretty soon. My daughter, who is about to turn one, is puzzled by why my Macbook Air doesn't do anything when she touches the screen. She doesn't recognize my dad's old Treo, which he gave her as a toy, as a phone, but will put a thin slab block up to her ear. We don't have cable at home, so she watches all her shows on Netflix and iTunes.
- einhverfr 13y agoDude, my copy of SCO Unix was only maybe 15 floppies....
- chadillac83 13y agokerchunk! brap brap brap eeee errrr eeeeeee errr brap brap aehhe aaaaeheh insert disc 2/15 http://i.imgur.com/aIv6Y90.jpg http://i.imgur.com/aIv6Y90.jpg
- einhverfr 13y agoThe really annoying thing about SCO Unix is that it didn't use BIOS so trying to install it on a system with an unsupported floppy disk drive controller would invariably have it unable to find the floppy disk after booting the first one, and if the video card was not supported, the screen would just go black after booting off the first disk. Oh those were the days.
- ck2 13y agoOS2 came on 32 (thirty-two) 5.25" disks. I remember loading that beast.
- danieldk 13y agoI remember OS/2 Warp on 3.5" disks being even worse. They had al kind of supplemental disks and IIRC something that resembled Microsoft Works (BonusPak, maybe it was a demo). To get an impression, I found this on eBay: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-IBM-OS-2-Warp-Version-3-with-BonusPak-3-5-Inch-Floppy-Disks-1994-/281188354666 http://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-IBM-OS-2-Warp-Version-3-with...
- iamben 13y agoWe're not very far away from "what is the blue 'Save' icon meant to be?" are we? Kind of amazing really. Girlfriend's nephews are 6 and 9, pretty tech savvy (there's a lot in the house), but they had no idea what the slots in the front of their grandfather's computer were (and why should they?!).
- adamlj 13y agoThe way things are going we will probably not have any Save buttons at all soon.
- eru 13y agoGoogle Docs doesn't have any.
- bentcorner 13y agoMaybe for certain applications we're used to saving in, but unless there are revolutionary changes in computing I'm betting that you'll be able to save in notepad for a long time coming.
- pekk 13y agoIt's used as Commit, and that will continue to be useful
- sbt 13y agoOh man I am getting old :)
- iv_08 13y agoFor the rugrats among us: http://imgur.com/bOdxEUW http://imgur.com/bOdxEUW
- ktzar 13y agoAre we that old? :(
- khill 13y agoTIL I am old.
- DanielBMarkham 13y agoI now officially christen this the "old guy thread of the day". Back in my day, kid, we didn't have no stinking floppies for our PCs. All we had was cassette recorders, and we were happy to have 'em! Reading this question took me down memory lane to doing a lot of PR#6. Couldn't remember if that command was for floppies or cassettes. Had to look it up. It was how we did I/O on the Apple II. As I remember, you changed the number (PR#3, PR#4, etc) based on the physical slot the peripheral was plugged into. This was back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and real men wore skirts.
- CurtHagenlocher 13y agoIf I remember correctly, "PR#6" was basically just a command that executed the code at $c600. Each peripheral card had a 256-byte address space which was mapped into $cx00 where x was the slot number. Slot 6 was the standard slot for the disk controller -- it may even have been wired in, in later machines. So "PR#6" basically executed the firmware boot loader for the floppy drive.
- DanielBMarkham 13y agoWhat I found weird was that I remembered the command, but not the technology it came from or exactly how I used it. So I'm Googling around trying to figure out when and why it was important. For some reason I remembered it as "Print #6". Old age and forgetfulness is going to be really strange for a whole generation of computer nerds. So many different technologies, commands, and paradigms all jumbled up.
- gutsy 13y agoSee, my first computer was a Tandy 1000 and it just ran off of floppies and RAM. No hard drive. My mind was blown when we upgraded to a Windows 3.1 system that not only had a hard drive, but also a 3.5" floppy drive. WHOA, SMALLER DISKS.
- amerika_blog 13y agoIf I could, I'd start everyone off "learning" about computers by using an Apple ][+. It is an open enough environment to learn just about everything, and a restricted enough environment to encourage efficiency and elegant design. After that, kick 'em upstairs to something modern with a Lisp compiler and you've got 'em for life.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- afandian 13y agoI found this really sad. I don't consider myself old, but I suppose I'm going to have to start at some point. Maybe this is it.
- bnegreve 13y agoAnd I've just noticed that the "save file" icon in word processors isn't a floppy disk as it used to be.
- tanzam75 13y ago> And I've just noticed that the "save file" icon in word processors isn't a floppy disk as it used to be. Maybe the one you're using. But the "Save" icon in the most popular word processor is a 3.5" floppy disk: http://i.imgur.com/WLFtT7A.png http://i.imgur.com/WLFtT7A.png This is the latest version -- Word 2013.
- bnegreve 13y agoahaha thanks :) I checked on LibreOffice and naively assumed that anything else would have a more modern icon set.
- ceautery 13y agoThat's pretty fun. I'm glad the highest voted reply on superuser wasn't snarky about the answer. This sort of reminds me of the "Who the hell is Paul McCartney?" thing on Twitter recently... which is an order of magnitude more irritating than a kid who never saw a floppy drive.
- raldi 13y agoAlso, even if you only had one physical floppy drive, it would still respond to A: and B:, albeit as split personalities. What I mean is that you could stick your programs disk in there and type A:EDITOR.EXE to run some editing program, and then go to save your document and type B:MYDOC.TXT as the filename, and DOS would know that you wanted to write this file to a different floppy, so it would day, "Insert disk for drive B and press enter", prompting you to swap the floppies. Then, when the editor program needed to access some of its files again, it would try to access, say, A:LIBRARY.OVL, and DOS would know that meant it was time to prompt the user to swap disks again.
- danellis 13y agoAt that time (okay, a little later, but there was some overlap), I was using RISC OS. Its disk format allowed for each disk to have a name, which would be used in fully qualified filenames (e.g. ADFS::MyData.$.Docs.Resume). The OS could then ask for the disk by name (MyData).
- D9u 13y agoMy first PC didn't have a C: drive. It had two 5.25" diskettes to load the systems.
- gutsy 13y agoYup, me too. Put the DOS disk in start up the computer, then switch disks as you needed to to run programs. That was so fun!
- Tichy 13y agoI've used floppy disks and tape recorders, but I'm a bit embarrassed that I never used punch cards.
- ytch 13y agoIt just like talking about programming on punch card to Generation Y
- chrissmeuk 13y agoHow quaint. I still use floppy disks. I have a synthesizer (korg triton studio) which uses them for backups from its internal hard disk. I never managed to get sysex to work properly with my MIDI adapter so floppy disks are actually pretty convenient for backing up songs and patches to my PC for later archiving. In the new year, it will be replaced with a CF reader and IDE/SCSI bridge (as I have most of the bits lying around) though as it's more convenient and the internal disk is 11 years old which scares me.
- IgorPartola 13y agoIn 2008 I got to play with an old oscilloscope/i486 hybrid beast with dual 5.25 inch floppy drives still in use at my physics lab. You could save the measurements to B while running the code off A. AFAIK it is still in use.
- bane 13y agoMy first computer came with no drives, the tape drive was an optional accessory. Loading programs from tape instead of typing them into the basic was loads better. When I got my first PC I had a 3.5" (on B) and a 5.25" (on A) and a bunch of my friends kept coming over to have me copy their 5.25" disks to 3.5" disks and I was the cool kid on the block for a few months.
- kabdib 13y agoMy first mass storage was a PhiDeck, a tape cassette drive that stored data digitally and that had motors to load and unload the heads and seek. It had a file system, of sorts, that fit in about 6K of RAM. Effective data rate was about 9600 bits/second, and it usually took 20-30 seconds to launch a program. Primitive and slow as it was, it was still a vast improvement over audio cassettes. Later, I wrote a software UART and interfaced my Z-80 system to a single Atari 810 disk drive. 96K of storage and tons faster. I got a lot of work done on that system.
- lttlrck 13y agoOne of my favorites memories is my dad trying to copy a BBC Model B compact audio cassette without a cable ... speaker to microphone! He started it and crept out the room quietly closing the door behind him. It did not work.
- smartaleckkill 13y agoI recall recording software onto audio tape from radio broadcasts, I think it was a regular BBC radio show. (If anyone remembers I'd love a reminder of the details.)
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- wazoox 13y agoI had a Toshiba laptop once that came without any software floppies; instead at first boot you had to generate the installation floppies for windows 95 and MS Office. If I recall correctly it asked for something like 80 floppies. Nightmare.
- anilmujagic 13y agoI remember zipping the game on cca. 30 floppies at friend's place, then going home and trying to unzip. Of course 27th or so would be corrupted. Sometimes it took me 3-4 round trips to friend's place and back, to get the game transferred :) BTW, does anyone remember having to enter no. of cylinders in BIOS to make the HDD work :)
- thinkersilver 13y agoI remember laughing at my instructor when he mentioned carrying a box of punch cards. Boy do I feel like the old timer now.
- colomon 13y agoI spent a good bit of the summer of '89 writing C code to drive a tape punch for programming CNC machines.
- Stratoscope 13y agoWhen I got my first IBM PC in early 1982, IBM only offered single sided single density floppy drives with 160KB each. But double sided drives were already available on the market. The only problem was that the PC BIOS and DOS didn't support the second side. So I bought a PC with no floppy drives and picked up a couple of double sided drives at a local distributor for $300 each. As I'd hoped, they worked fine as single sided drives too, so I was able to boot DOS. Then I got to work on supporting the other side. It seemed a bit complicated to try to merge the two sides into a single FAT filesystem, so I wrote a TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident program) that mapped the other two sides onto additional drive letters. That turned out to be surprisingly easy. So the four sides on my two floppy drives were A:, B:, C:, and D: drives. Later I got an awesome Tallgrass 10MB hard drive for only $5000, and that became my E: drive. Now I knew my storage problems were over: I would never run out of space with that thing!
- lobo_tuerto 13y agoFloppy DUO Imperial March: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHJOz_y9rZE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHJOz_y9rZE
- DiabloD3 13y agohttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enZ4P7Azxys http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enZ4P7Azxys Doctor Who on 8 floppies
- wpietri 13y agoEspecially appropriate for this article given that the top comment is "It's A:\Trap".
- jerryr 13y agoThank you for kicking off the youtubes. I really, really needed to post this here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up863eQKGUI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up863eQKGUI (don't copy that floppy)
- thearn4 13y agoIt's funny to think that only exposure folks have to floppy disks now is the look of "save" icons.
- mratzloff 13y agoMy first computer was an Atari 800. It had a cassette deck and a 5 1/4" disk drive. I spent a lot of my youth typing in BASIC games that were printed in magazines and books, then modifying them to learn how it worked. My first programming language... When my parents brought home an IBM-compatible PC with an enormous 50 MB hard drive I could hardly believe my luck. Anyway, I don't need this to feel old; my wife already does that. She was in middle school when I was in college, and asks things like, "What's Galaga?" But I suspect she does it on purpose about half the time now...
- Osiris 13y agoLuckily in Windows you can reassign drive letters in the Computer Management tool. I've reassigned my two optical drives to A: and B:.
- japhyr 13y agoMy dad worked for DEC in the 70's and 80's. When I was young he took us in and showed us a cabinet that had a bunch of spinning platters in it. They looked like 12" record albums, but they were light brown and made of metal. At least that's how I remember it, and I imagine they were the precursors to today's spinning hard disks. My dad let my brother and I take a couple retired disks home. We tried to play frisbee once or twice with them, and then wisely decided that was probably a bad idea.
- mililani 13y agoMan, this question makes me feel old as hell--I'm 40, btw. It reminds me of the time when my friend's daughter asked what the car window handle was for. I was like, it rolls the windows up and down. She thought it was a new thing. Wow.
- Aloha 13y agoI feel old.
- akhatri_aus 13y agoSeeing this made me smile. I haven't seen an A drive for ages now. I dont know about the times before 1998 where most people have a nostalgic memory of these, but they used to self corrupt like crazy all you had to fear was the "Do you want to format Drive A?"
- endgame 13y agoOnce upon a midnight dreary, fingers cramped and vision bleary, System manuals piled high and wasted paper on the floor, Longing for the warmth of bedsheets, Still I sat there, doing spreadsheets: Having reached the bottom line, I took a floppy from the drawer. Typing with a steady hand, I then invoked the SAVE command But got instead a reprimand: it read "Abort, Retry, Ignore." http://badpets.net/Humor/Tech/NeverMore.html http://badpets.net/Humor/Tech/NeverMore.html
- inlined 13y agoGod I feel old. I'm getting flashbacks of a quarter mile sneakernet between my friend & my house where we transferred MP3s on a floppy disk with multi-disk zips.
- _pferreir_ 13y agoNow I really feel old.
- csense 13y agoWhen I bought a new computer in 2002, I specifically got one which still had a floppy drive, because I wanted to be sure I could play all my DOS games via boot disk [1]. DOSBox [2] was still in its infancy then, and the DOS emulation in Windows was...less than one hundred percent compatible with all the hardware tricks various DOS games used to squeeze the last ounce of performance out of the hardware. (In the DOS days, it was common practice for application programs, especially games, to directly deal with I/O ports, interrupts, DMA, etc.) [1] A DOS boot disk is similar to a bootable Linux CD / DVD -- removable media containing an OS. In this case, you mainly use it to customize the loaded drivers on a per-game basis. Regardless of how much physical memory you have, in DOS only 640K is conveniently addressable [3], so it's very important to selectively load only the drivers a specific game needs. [2] http://www.classicdosgames.com/interviews/peterveenstra.html http://www.classicdosgames.com/interviews/peterveenstra.html [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conventional_memory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conventional_memory
- gutsy 13y agoOH man. Knowing the answer to this makes me feel so old. So, sooooo old.
- mariuolo 13y agoThis comes out periodically.
- lamontcg 13y agoFML I'm old