Export thread

Savvy, computer literate folk are asking questions that I know the answer to without even thinking, and the reason I know the answer is because it is hidden in the history of something I am familiar with:

http://superuser.com/questions/231273/what-are-the-windows-a-and-b-drives-used-for

That made me feel old too. Until I realized how fast computer tech has been moving. My boss still talks about hard drive bays that were less than 100 meg and were the size of a filing cabinet.

Old news is old.. and so are you.

170 kb!? who would ever need so much storage space?

My dad had a timex simclair when I was a kid, and we'd load programs from audio tape. We'd have to adjust the volume just right, plug in the little sinclair, and tell it to load it, then hit play.

Mazogs was the best game we had, and I wrote my first program on that computer.

First Lady Puffinstuff said:

My dad had a timex simclair when I was a kid, and we'd load programs from audio tape. We'd have to adjust the volume just right, plug in the little sinclair, and tell it to load it, then hit play.

Click to expand...

I started out with a datasette. Type "LOAD", press play on tape, go have dinner, watch some TV, get back to my room just in time for the program to finish loading.

So the B:\ drive is also for floppies... never knew that, i just thought the bigger floppies would just replace the smaller one...

what blows my mine is that they have never reused those letters. like you think they would make flash drives or something that letter.

You won't be old till you DON'T understand tech anymore, and anything that you do know, is so outdated and useless, you're pretty much laughed at for bringing it up.

You won't be old until you're Dave's age.

But Dave keeps getting older too. So I'll never be THAT old.
Added at: 14:57
My first computer upgrade was adding a 3.5 floppy to my PC-XT. I was rocking a 5.25 AND a 30 meg hard drive before.

Exactly. He's the ultimate demarcation. You can always tell yourself "I might be old, but at least I'm not as old as Dave!"

I'm going to be in so much trouble.

dude his full name is OLD MAN DAVE!

They still order 1.44MB floppy drives on the new Dells here at this university. Can you believe that?

when you can buy a 2 gb flash drive for 5 dollars?

Bones said:

dude his full name is OLD MAN DAVE!

Click to expand...

Dude, I'm a dudette.

the dude use dude for everyone. However; the dude abides by your request my most righteous dudette

@Li3n said:

So the B:\ drive is also for floppies... never knew that, i just thought the bigger floppies would just replace the smaller one...

Click to expand...

Yeah. The early computers had no hard drives. You had one floppy drive, and that was it. Unless you spent another $1k or so on a second floppy drive, then your system was smokin'! If you only had one drive it was common to boot from one disk, put in the other disk with your programs and data, then run the program. Once the program finished, the computer would request that you reinsert the boot disk so you could use the command line again. Copying data from one disk to the other was a series of "Please insert source disk into drive A:... Please insert destination disk into drive A:... Please insert source disk into drive A:... . . ."

By the time hard drives became cheap, the "expensive" computers typically had two floppy drives (one to boot and run common programs, one to save data and run specific programs). And so it was common for the motherboard hardware to support two floppy drives. Since it was built into the hardware, it was thought that building the same requirement into the OS was acceptable, and any hard drives added to the machine would start with disk C: and so forth.

During the transition from 5.25" disks (which were actually, physically floppy) to 3.5" disks (which were encased) it was common to have both drives in one system, and again it was supported on the motherboard with hardware, and in the OS as fixed addresses. As very few systems ran out of drive letters, it was not thought to be important to consider making those drives re-assignable in the OS until much later when drives were abstracted along with addresses due to the plug'n'play standard.

Bones said:

the dude use dude for everyone. However; the dude abides by your request my most righteous dudette

Click to expand...

Oh, no, no, if you call everyone "dude", I'll happily be your dude. Wait, that doesn't sound right.

OK, topical - I was cleaning out my computer desk and found my really old 256K "portable drive". It had a little cane and was talking about how USB drives these days don't know how good they've got it. I think I shall name it "Dave".

He's a dude, she's a dude, they're a dude, we're all dudes hey!

Emrys said:

Oh, no, no, if you call everyone "dude", I'll happily be your dude. Wait, that doesn't sound right.

Click to expand...

did you just ask me out?

Bones said:

did you just ask me out?

Click to expand...

Maybe.

brown chicken brown cow?

Bones said:

brown chicken brown cow?

Click to expand...

whut?

haha, say it to the tune of bum chicka bow wow.

Bones said:

haha, say it to the tune of bum chicka bow wow.

Click to expand...

D'oh!

If I want to feel stupid I go to Stack Overflow.

Now what is the message on Stackoverflow? The message is that there are known "knowns." There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we do not know we don't know.

When we start to believe that we know enough, we visit stackoverflow which helps us comprehend the fact that we, in fact, actually know nothing.

Sara_2814 said:

A:\ & B:\ drives? Pffft! I loaded my disks (170KB!) with LOAD "*",8,1.

Click to expand...

Commodore up in this bitch, old school, yo!

... Okay, even though I was being ironic, that hurt to write.

*tsk* Young'uns

Does this mean that my Abacus is out of date?

What about these notches in groups of five on my wolf femur?