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I want to know at what point people started saying the clunkier “hard disk drive” instead of just “hard drive”, because it definitely happened.
A: B: were for dual floppy drives. per dos manual. and fuck off with back slashes. forward slash is fs root / drives are devices under /dev.
I get you, but it’d fuck up my title, and it was also 1996 the last time I used them.
- i was hacking config.sys and autoexec.bat to optimize memory for games. after enough lock-ups, i dove into linux. just deleted my last unused windows partition. cost me a hundred dollars 20 years ago.
/ did not care but it was the way of the penguin, the child of the even older gods of ix.
Hail Hard Drive! Praised be its name!
Jokes on you old gods, my blu ray drive is B:
Apostate
Weren’t the first drives magnetic tape? I don’t think I’d call a deck of cards a drive, necessarily, nor TTY or something.
We’re talking the first Microsoft drives, not the first drives that ever existed. Windows inherits from DOS. DOS was a competitor with CP/M mostly, iirc, and got to invent various standard and quirks all of its own, which passed on to Windows (which was originally a simple shell on top of dos until 95).
even 95 is still running dos at it’s core. NT4, 2000 finally moved away from loading shit on top of command.com
command.com was just the shell (like bash, zsh, Windows Terminal), not the kernel. Pre-NT Windows would use API calls to talk to the DOS kernel, bypassing command.com.
the Windows GUI win.exe would probably be launched by command.com, though, because it was specified in autoexec.bat, the batch of startup tasks designed to be read by command.com. command.com could be closed after autoexec.bat had run.
the DOS kernel would generally only be used for 16-bit programs, 32-bit programs were managed by a newer kernel more towards the NT kernel.
the whole situation was a horrible mess and never worked very reliably.
Does a reel count as a “drive?”
Actual hard drives (i.e. spinning metallic platters) go all the way back to 1956 (and predate floppies by 11 years):
Magnetic tape reels do win if they count, though. They were invented in 1951.
Sources:
A little more nerd knowledge: Different forms of storage media that were able to have gigabytes of storage on them were already in scientific development way before the first ever cd-r hit the market.
I’d imagine the first drives were boxes of punch cards.
I was trying to think of something that can I/O on the same thing as input which is why I skipped that. I think some nominally could mark a card as read or something, but I don’t think that counts. I may be missing something. I don’t think paper tape could really do output, either. Terminals are interactive and ephemeral so I didn’t think those would be a good fit for a drive, either.
When I was a wee child we had a box of floppy disks for my first computer. They were all the colors of the rainbow, 5 for each color, and my little neurodivergent self got so much satisfaction sorting them to be in order of the color wheel (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, etc) and I also loved carefully using them as a fidget toy by flipping the little metal piece that covered the disk itself back and forth repeatedly.
I really miss floppy disks for some dumb reason. I wish they’d bring them back with the same type of technology that is used in micro SD cards, solely for the nostalgia factor.
I used to love sorting my dad’s rolodex of floppy a disks. He had the 5" floppy b’s and he kept those, “for memories” because no one used them anymore at the time.
He had like 4 floppy rolodex cases.
It must have been so fun playing with save icons:-)
And before A: and B:, we had cassette tape decks for our Commodores!
It took 40 minutes to load a program.
You don’t know what a cassette or a Commodore is, do you? Damn kids, get off my lawn
LOAD “*”,1,1
LOAD “*”,8,1 if you had a fancy 1541
To this day, the most advanced floppy drive ever made.
I remember having to bang on it to realign the heads
Yes pretty much everyone alive knows what a cassette is. They might not know what a Commodore is specifically
I think a lot of people who know what a cassette is would be surprised by one that holds computer files.
I had a cassette drive for my CoCo3 from RadioShack.
I spent a weekend typing in code in BASIC from a magazine to play a shitty pacman clone, tried to save it to the tape, and forgot the first few inches on a new cassette aren’t magnetic and can’t save anything…
But have you seen Sonic the Hedgehog run at 60 FPS on a C64 though the magic of the REU’s DMA? PRAISE BE THE FORGOTTEN!
Wouldn’t careful alignment be 5.25, and the click be 3.5? Or am I way off here? 5.25 are the big black actual floppy discs right? And then 3.5 or the smaller encased in harder shelled plastic with the little snappy metal sliding piece?
Also, what is going up with the letter p in this screenshot?:
the p tank is full
Pretty sure the first floppies were 7", but there weren’t in use for very long. But, I would agree with your assessment regarding the two sizes most of us were familiar with.
8", not 7". Apparently, Strategic Air Command was using them to control nuclear weapon launch facilities until surprisingly recently (2019).
Thanks for the correction; admittedly, those were a little before my time, although I did see then once or twice in the wild.
Speaking of storage technology that just won’t die, I think magnetic tape backups still exist in one form or another.
Magnetic tape isn’t obsolete at all. Apparently these days they’re up to LTO-10, which can store 40TB per tape, and it’s also the cheapest storage medium per unit capacity (albeit with an extremely high initial cost for the drive itself). The only reason people forget about it is because it isn’t popular for home use.
just a couple days ago fuji announced they were investing a lot more into tape:
https://www.techspot.com/news/114394-fujifilm-pours-64-million-magnetic-tape-production-ai.html
Man i wish i had the money for one of these machines. I could really use a cold storage solution that doesn’t cost an arm and an leg if you close in on the triple-digit TBs of data.
Shouldn’t data centers be doing reels of data tape then instead of taking all our forms of removable media?
Wouldn’t that make a lot more sense? 40tb reels sound a lot more effective than a 4tb HD. Probably a lot less heat too.
Well, they can only be read linearly so they suck for random-access storage. But they are used in data centers, for backups.
I seem to remember a swinging arm that I would click in place after inserting a 5 and a quarter floppy. I do think the 3 and a half floppies ticked a little when you pushed them into the drive, but not nearly so much as clicking the arm in place for the larger ones.
It depended on the model i think. I remember having exactly 1 3.5 drive with the clicky arm, but all the others did the tape deck thing.
It would pop the ejection button into place when you put it in the drive ☺️ I mss that click. You just knew it was working.
Man, I really miss the tactility of older computer hardware!
It’s all the letters along that column. There’s a weird artifacting that bolds everything along that line.
Stretching, not bolding. Look at the p in floppy
Actually it’s because C: is a happy drive and wants to show it. D: is less positive about things.
Happy drive?
You sound like Bob Ross :)Tilt
S: is your silly\sarcasm drive.
O: is for your oh-oh’s.
P: is for tongue-out or pipe smoking files.
X: is strictly hush hush. Agent Mulder will already have access.At work we have the Q drive, I only admins have access to it and it has all of the programs we don’t want the users running themselves like wireshark, the occasionally we need to install.
Give me the D:!
D:
The :D drive on the other hand is just ecstatic.
I’m not reading all that. Upvote.
You should, though. It’s beatiful!
Is this accurate?
All of it except the part where it implies people immediately abandoned floppies when hard drives showed up. They coexisted for quite a while, and computers would often have one hard drive and one floppy drive (so
A:\andC:\withoutB:\).Also it was a lot more religious than the post implies.
obviously. The author is just making it humorous by leaning on religion tropes
I think you might’ve misread my comment ;-)
The BIOS part is not correct but that’s nitpicking. Also omits the second coming of floppies through ZIP drives.
Yeah, with some embellishment.
Others have answered everything, but just to confirm it: when I started secondary school they still had a room full of computers that didn’t have a hard drive. They all worked off of floppy disks. During classes all of them went zugg-zugg-zugg-tsk-tsk.
“The children must not be shown the old gods” This is true only in the most direct way. There is the effigy known as the save icon, which is in very widespread use. Sometimes this leads to questions of “why does it look like that?” and answers of “clouds used to be plastic rectangles with a metal clicky frame you slotted into the big off-white box”.
Yes, a and b were floppy drives and are “reserved” insomuch as C:\ is the default for compatibility reasons.
A and B were floppy
What I never understood was why eventually the B letter stopped being used even on machines that had two floppy disk drives. I remember very clearly using the second floppy on E:, F: and sometimes even D:, but I’ve never seen it being used as B:.
Was it reserved to some kind of swapping system that later became irrelevant with hard disks?
I think the convention was to put the fixed internal drives first because they were more unlikely to change, and then use the later letters for external swappable drives.
In the time when the B: drive was relevant a lot of software might have had hard coded the letters, so it made sense to avoid it to preserve the compability with legacy software as more drives were added.
Remember that weird period of zip disks?
My dad thought they were gonna be the fucking future and was trying to get everyone in the house to use it and my mom knew about the fact they can die and that she’d rather use disks.
I liked it, it sucked when my first ever back up of all my files from the family computer was no longer accessible due to the red light of death.
Yes, but they got the letter Z, obviously. For the makers spoke: I created Windows 95 and I will give you the power to map your drive letters. But behold! Thou shake only map removable drives and let the hard drives be, for these are still assigned the old way by the old system.
There was a brief window of time where CD burners were new and beyond my financial reach, and so were new Zip drives, but companies were dumping Zip drives for rewritable CDs. I managed to score a free external Zip drive that was going to be trashed, and it was a godsend of an upgrade from 3.5" floppies.
Until I got a second-hand CD-RW drive, then I dumped it too.
That’s where we got half our electronics from, the good ol’ corporate recycle bin.
I had a windows 98SE laptop as a kid with a full power dock and a tiny bubble jet printer.
Zip drive
click…click…
click…click…
<noooooooooo>
That was my
E:\drive!(
D:\was the CD-ROM, of course.)
Mostly, the part where Microsoft said children should not learn the ways of the old gods should be disregarded.
Every child of the computer should endeavour to learn the old magicks to an extent, many abstractions lay between us and it now but the further one progresses in their studies, the more they will find the old to be a beacon and anchor guiding to them to the rightful truth they require.
But why a backslash as separator? Why ô why!
No no, the real question is why CR LF instead of LF or CR? Why two characters for a line break motherfuckers?
It makes assignments seem longer.
Because Teleprinters! Carriage return goes back to the start of the line, line feed goes to the next line. If you wanted “bold” on a teleprinter you just did a CR without the LF and printed the same text over the top again.
When they added directories to DOS, they decided that the colons used as a separator on the DEC system they were basing it on were silly, and the forward slashes used by Unix were nicer. Forward slashes were already the character used to identify something as a command line option rather than a filename on DOS, though, because the world hadn’t settled on Unix’s dash convention yet, and lots of existing software just checked whether an argument contained forward slashes to decide whether or not it was a filename. That software would break if paths could contain forward slashes. However, there was a tempting character on the keyboard originally used to type ∨ and ∧ before unicode that was also a slash, so they used that.
Because forward slashes are used in English
I wonder if it’s legal to have a forward slash in a filename on Windows?
Nope, I use ⧸ as a replacement.
I remember seeing my first pc with two 5.25" drives. the luxury! you could have two entire data sets accessible, you could jump from one program to another without changing disks…
then a few years later I got a 20mb hdd, and copied almost everything I owned to it - and still had 3 mb free. a: and b: were nice, but boy wow this hard drive thing was mindblowing
And here’s me with my one terabyte drive and it’s nearly full. Of what I really couldn’t say, I don’t feel like I have all that much saved on here, but apparently it takes up a whole terabyte.
it’s ok, you can admit it, it’s fulla goat porn.
hot, steamy, bleaty goat porn. hooves and horns everywhere.
My piano also starts on C 🤔
CIA
There’s a great Calvin’s dad answer in there somewhere.
“Ha! C used to be the first letter. Then a famous Roman emperor added A and B at the beginning because typing was too hard without them.”
“They had computers back then?”
“Oh no, they used typewriters. But none of the oldest typewriters survived because they were made from Ea Nasir’s inferior copper.”
