- cross-posted to:
- microblogmemes@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- microblogmemes@lemmy.world
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/62743547
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And then there’s Linux, no pondering about media before, it just cares which it found after another on each interface upon boot.
Also, I’m sure the alphabet naming thing came from C/C++, which came after C, which borrowed from B, etc. And yes, there is a D, but people prefer scripting languages because reasons.
I mean I purchased an external floppy for my undergrad laptop as recently as… 2004… Oh shit that was 22 years ago… Fuck a kid born a year later can legally buy alcohol and a kid born then is graduating from undergraduate…
When did I get old?
I remember building a computer in 2004 and finally making the decision to not include a floppy drive since I had just been booting from the CD drive for the past couple of issues anyways.
I was reminded of this several years later when I made the decision not to include a disk drive in my latest build.
Easy. At some point between then and now.
I remember the first computer my family had, when i was around 5 hears old, was an old IBM something with a laborious switch to power it on. Like a flick switch that pulled a metal rod, i dont know the specifics but this rod must have moved something to complete and electrical circuit and the thing came to life.
It had 1 floppy drive and a blanker for a second. A: and B: were reserved for these drives. Windows 3.11 was installed from 12 floppy disks and we ran all of our games from DOS. Except lemmings which was built into the OS.
The box was horizontal, that classic beige colour and had the classic IBM 2 button mouse. No speakers. No modem. A 12 inch crt screen (in matching beige)
We had a dot matrix printer that we never replaced the ink ribbon for. So after that ran dry we just used the paper for drawing on.
I miss that machine.
People talk about the legacy of the floppy disk (mid-eighties to mid-aughts) being used as a save icon, but drive letters are even more extreme - and absurd - than that.
CP/M came out in 1974 and introduced drive letters A: and B: for floppy drives, and Microsoft copied that for DOS and the early DOS-based versions of Windows. Microsoft finally killed off the DOS lineage with Windows Me in 2000, so that was 26 years of drive letters actually being part of the OS’ architecture.
Windows NT came out in 1993 - 19 years after CP/M - and didn’t use drive letters but for the sake of backwards compatibility and familiarity it would emulate them. All versions of Windows since 2000 are based on NT. So we had 26 years of drive letters being needed, and 33 years of faking it for consistency.
I need a historical fantasy book in this concept.
I got you, OP…
C:\DOS
C:\DOS\RUN
RUN\DOS\RUN
Anyone: “In the beginning…”
My Freakin’ Brain: “Inne de beninng-ing.”
Glad to see I wasn’t the only one lol
I just need to pause and reflect on the level of commitment in that post. They started out strong, and just kept on going.
Absolutely outstanding.
Us Linux heathens never had any of the letter gods, we just worship the one and only, the beginning and the end, the alpha and the omega, the one true god:
/
is that on /dev/sda ?
It’s wherever came loading from initramfs and vmlinuz. Basically, whatever BIOS/UEFI found as the Lord of the Roots.
It’s always there, even before anything is mounted. You just overlay a filesystem over it during boot.
And the CD-ROM drive was D:
It was called “D” for “disk”, duh.
(The above comment for legal purposes is a joke.)
“D” was actually used for “Drink Holder”
*disc
I was convinced I had seen the spelling ‘disk’ before, so I looked it up and found this (new to me) and interesting distinction on wiktionary.
In most varieties of English, disk is the preferred spelling for magnetic media (hence floppy disk, hard disk, disk drive), whereas disc is preferred for optical media (hence compact disc, digital versatile disc, optical disc). For all other uses, disk is preferred in American English and acceptable in Canadian English, and disc otherwise. Less commonly, disc is used for magnetic media (as in floppy disc and discette); similarly, disk is sometimes used for optical media, as in compact disk and optical disk.
But also both forms seem to be usable for geometric disc shapes.
Back in the XP era, I set a hard drive to B and random installers would refuse to target it because they insisted it was too small. Good times.
But they were, all of them, deceived, for another drive was made.
Yeah /dev/sda
It used to be /dev/hd0. On OpenBSD, it’s often /dev/wd0
I found out about an unlimited drive that big tech doesn’t want you to know about, it’s called /dev/null
I think Sam Altman doesn’t want you to know about /dev/shm
It’s amazing how much you can store in /dev/null
For once the question was actually dumb. Kids these days don’t know about the dual-floppy setup that ruled the world until hard drives became affordable.
Yeah, like how it’s dumb for kids to not know about dialling rotary phones, manually tuning in a TV with a knob, being afraid of burning themselves of the incandescent bulb in their bedside lamp or rewinding a VHS tape before ejecting it from the VCR.
How it is dumb? There’s no reason for anyone who wasn’t alive then to know about A and B drives.
That’s not “dumb”, it’s “not knowing a thing” and I’m sure you do it too.
Tribute to all the old high priests who were executing the extended memory settings ritual based on each software requirements! We are the guardians of ancient knowledde!
You shall never be forgotten, sacred Amstrad 1512 DD, 512kB of RAM and Dual Drives, luxury of your time! Praise be to DR DOS an GEM Desktop!
Ah, Sierra. I played Return to Krondor back in the day, and it’s a great game. Unfortunately, and if I remember correctly, the installer was kind of bugged. See, when you installed the game, it created a Sierra folder in your desired destination folder. But when you uninstalled it, it removed everything in the folder that contained the Sierra folder. I luckily installed it in my Games folder and only lost some games in the process. If you installed the game in to the root of you C drive and then uninstalled it… Well, you were in for a fun evening.
Thanks Sierra. I’m glad you’re dead.
Well, bugs happen. I’m not as glad about them being dead, they had a ton of great titles, two of my favourite series being NOLF and Empire Earth
Admittedly some of the best Sierra titles (including the ones I named) were only published by them and developed by others, but as I understand it, that means they still financed at least some part of the development if it was a small dev studio.
