Drive letters?
Yeah, I always thought the drive letters weren’t a very elegant solution to the problem. Can have only 26 devices. Should just use numbers. You can fit 256 devices in one-byte integer identifier! Like how tape drive is 1 and printer is 4 and floppy drives are 8, 9 and so on.
spoiler
Fun thing, when you attach a USB floppy drive on a modern Windows 11 system, it’ll dutifully give it drive letter A: and even has a floppy drive icon. (Which admittedly doesn’t look like a floppy drive. At all. But it has a floppy!)
And why yes, I’ve seen it a time or two in recent years, because I’ve been archiving some stuff. Imaging shitloads of old floppies.
Every Windows is built on every generation before it. All sorts of legacy stuff is hidden and embedded inside that still works that’s useless. Dialer.exe still runs from the Run cmd. Com/LPT1 stuff should still be there for old printers.
I personally don’t have the heart to say any of the legacy support stuff is completely useless. I mean, yeah, Windows has support for floppy drives (through standard USB mass storage), but you know what? I can image old floppies through it. If Windows recognises floppy drives and gives it drive letter A, that’s not that much of bloat really, just an entry in a list or something.
And also most Linux distributions also have ancient-ass legacy stuff, though admittedly usually you need to specifically install it and maybe even hack a bit to get it to work again. …why yes, I am going to do physical terminal stuff one day, 1980s style, and I’ll be very mad if I need to hack serial getty support in the hard way!
Yeah and if you put a second one it’s B:. At least on my slowly dying 7 machine.
I set my memory card reader to the letter A, but I also have my old Lightscribe DVD drive (and looking for one optical drive for my ThinkPad), and have a few floppy drives put away for potential hobby projects.
My disk was a floppy until you walked by. Now it’s solid state.
Oh yeah, that reminds me of that time SO’s PC had
C:for the OS andD:for data and wanted to format it, so i booted it to DOS (i think it was still win 98 SE) and happily formattedC:only to discover that in DOS i was actually formattingD:… fun times.I think I still have a few 3 1/2" and even 5 1/4" around here somewhere. I even had a 120mb Superdisk drive. I bought it used and got 4 or 5 years of use from it. It could hold 1000’s of CNC programs and even CAD drawings.
***Great Googlely Moogely! You can still get Super disks on eBay!
Sorry, been busy
Stuff to do.
Brrrrr ck
Cachk-cachk
Nrrrrrrrrrr
Yeah i can hear that drive letter 35 years after the fact
i still kinda like the big floppy design. It just looks like it means business.
I miss floppies. Putting them in and taking them out was so satisfying. Remember when you had to install stuff with like a hundred of them? The ker-chicks and that smooth sliding feel as the sheath slid open…
Theme Park came on 8 floppies, was my first game.
Ahhh yes. Sitting there drinking tea and flippin’ floppies for half an hour or even longer. And there was always that one that would read well.
I had reason to use an optical drive lately, and even that was a blast from the past. Hitting eject, watching the light blink and then the drawer opens. USB-based storage just isn’t the same.
I regularly use optical drives for the movies. Why should I pay twice the price to “buy” some movie from Apple or Google? I rather wait 2 days for the mailman to deliver me a Blu-ray that doesn’t only have better quality, but also keeps working when some company decides to stop licensing the stuff I purportedly “bought”. Second-hand discs sometimes cost as much as 1€.
But well, I might be a bit old school, as I just got a few new vinyls delivered to me the other day.
Something I recently learned: it is outright impossible to legally play 4k blu rays on PC.
When you’re old enough to buy physical media, your eyes have gone bad enough that you don’t need 4k 8-)
I still have my tape drive.
I’m glad my punch tape drive is long gone. We used a paper punch tape reel to reel on a garden cart to wheel around the shop floor to load CNC programs onto CNC mills. Often with hand written gcode. Gods, I hated that thing. Floppies were far faster and far more reliable.
Of course I know him, he’s me!
/dev/sda1
I think the equivalent would be /dev/fd0 or something like that
If you’re not setting emojis as your drive letters, you’re living in the past.
Incidentally, don’t open the 😳: drive
😈
🦫🐈🐇🦇🦋🌮🦪
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)Fav drive
When I’m on Windows, I use
subst A: %USERPROFILE%\GitHubto mount my local repos as drive A for shorter paths.Neat.
My first PC is still in storage. It had
- A: 3.5 floppy
- B: 5.25 floppy
- C: HDD
- D: CD-RW
- E: ZIP drive
I have a 5.25 floppy in my shop just as a reminder of the past. I wonder what I burned on it decades ago it all the time.
You burned floppy discs?
Copied. Burned. The terminology changed a lot and I got old.
On the lower density 5.25s, you can actually write the data by hand using a wood burning kit.
ZIP drives were a game changer at the time. We had no other (fast) way to move larger amounts of data in one shot without compressing / archiving over multiple disks.
Last year I dug a couple hundred zip disks out of my parents attic and bought an old zip drive off eBay so I could read them. They all still worked. My old data got moved to the cloud and the zip discs + drive went back to the attic. Perhaps in another 20 years I’ll dig it out again if we still have USB ports on our systems haha.
Anyways, the USB thumb drive business killed iomega overnight.
Fellow zip and jaz drive enjoyer, those were halcyon days. Grandfather’s (and by extension, my first) PC was an IBM dual 5.25, and I still remember buying my first 2x cdrw, by TDK. Thing was finicky as all fuck and wasted many a burn, but it’s was glorious and burned my first mp3 CD.
I remember feeling cool when we got our ZIP 250 drive
This is the way
This is the way
