- cross-posted to:
- programmer_humor@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- programmer_humor@programming.dev
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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:\).Yes, a and b were floppy drives and are “reserved” insomuch as C:\ is the default for compatibility reasons.
A and B were floppy
Remember that weird period of zip disks?
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 was my
E:\drive!(
D:\was the CD-ROM, of course.)
Yeah, with some embellishment.
King’s Quest, Space Quest…
Heros Quest II: so you want to be a hero.
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.
Jokes on you old gods, my blu ray drive is B:
Actually it’s because C: is a happy drive and wants to show it. D: is less positive about things.
Give me the D:!
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).
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.
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?:
It’s all the letters along that column. There’s a weird artifacting that bolds everything along that line.
the p tank is full
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.
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).
