• heartSagan5@lemmy.zip
    4·
    7 days ago

    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.

    • Hal@piefed.nzEnglish
      14·
      8 days ago

      I was explaining to my kids about floppy disks, and mentioned the save icon. The what? The button you press to save. It just says “save” they said.

      I think they use the Google suite at school, and apparently the save button just says “save”. Although TBH I half expected them to not know of it because of auto-saving.

    • Kojichan@lemmy.world
      6·
      8 days ago

      They are trying to change those icons now, too. People dont recognize them so they use others.

      • TheKingBee@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        8 days ago

        I haven’t seen that, any examples?

        I don’t why they’d change that either, just because they don’t know the origin, they still grew up knowing it meant “save.”

        • Kojichan@lemmy.world
          3·
          8 days ago

          I remember seeing a program that used something else once, and when I worked in web apps and websites, there was always a debate about what to use.

          A common one is a folder icon (or a tray) with a download arrow… DESPITE it being used to save locally. Same thing with a cloud with a down arrow.

          Some other programs used to use the icon for a hard disk, the three circular platters.

          If I remember the app, Ill give better examples of programs that use other things.

  • massive_bereavement@fedia.io
    69·
    8 days ago

    “And the bios sayeth unto the user: Come forth and insert disk 23 of 30. And they did so. When the needle of the drive tested the disk, it had become corrupted, verily.”

    • jballs@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      30·
      8 days ago

      “Thus the monkey of the isle demanded Disk 114 be inserteth. Yet there was no Disk 114 and much confusion was sewn.”

    • thisbenzingring@lemmy.todayEnglish
      19·
      8 days ago

      Not joking but I did 1800 support for Windows 95 and at the end, right before 98, there was a constant problem with a specific floppy and people would like call us and we would try to send them a cd replacement but could send the fixed floppy. It was silly because it was the most common call for a bit. Like that batch of floppies all died at the same time

  • HexesofVexes@lemmy.world
    31·
    8 days ago

    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.

  • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
    28·
    8 days ago

    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:

    /

  • MissingGhost@lemmy.ml
    23·
    8 days ago

    It’s a Windows convention, but, if you are old enough, it was a DOS convention and a CP/M convention.

  • lime!@feddit.nu
    18·
    8 days ago

    i think even usb floppies show up as a:, don’t they? i’ve not used windows for a decade now, thankfully.

  • egregiousRac@piefed.socialEnglish
    18·
    8 days ago

    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.

  • tigerhawkvok@startrek.websiteEnglish
    15·
    7 days ago

    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?

    • RobotsLeftHand@lemmy.world
      5·
      7 days ago

      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.

  • rumschlumpel@feddit.org
    14·
    8 days ago

    I experienced a time period where 3.5" discs coexisted with harddrives, but I’ve never seen a system where B: is actually used…

    • r00ty@kbin.life
      18·
      8 days ago

      Going to show my age again now.

      I think post 1990, they were rare. Essentially there was a time before that though, when computers often didn’t have a hard drive. Because they were like 10MB and cost thousands of whatever your currency may be.

      So in those days (8088/8086 based systems largely), it was common for there to be 2x5.25" drives. A: and B:. C: was a status symbol, the lambo of the early computer era.

      As hard drives became more affordable (for levels of affordability), there was also the rise of the new disk type. 3.5". In that case it wasn’t too uncommon to have a 3.5" drive, a 5.25" drive and a hard disk. So you’d have A:, B: and C:.

      I think after the mid 90s the much more common setup was a single high density 3.5" drive A: and a hard disk C:. In the office we also had an F: drive (Novell netware network drive).

      A: and B: were by and large kept free out of that history. I am pretty sure you can map HDDs/SSDs to them these days though if you want to.

      • Tahl_eN@lemmy.world
        6·
        8 days ago

        Yeah, I had and used a number of PCs in the late 80s and mid 90s with the 3.5" A: and 5.25" B:. But my step dad was a programmer, so we had piles of both media around the house.

    • palordrolap@fedia.io
      9·
      8 days ago

      For that brief period in the mid-'90s I owned a PC with twin 3½" floppy drives. I never really used the second one, but I enjoyed the novelty and the fact that all my drive letters were in use. I also saw a handful of computers with both 3½" and 5¼" drives in some of the university PC labs. I don’t think I ever saw anyone use the 5¼" slot of any of them, but the 3½" floppy drives got a decent amount of use.

      Fun fact though: You could still use B: in DOS commands even if you only had an A: drive. The system would prompt you to switch disks as and when A: was about to pretend to be B: and then switch back afterwards.

    • skisnow@lemmy.caEnglish
      3·
      8 days ago

      I had one, A: is where the CP/M boot disc lived and B: was for all the actual stuff.

    • 🌞 Alexander Daychilde 🌞@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      8 days ago

      My computer at home had a single floppy (and two 10MB hard drives C: and D:), but the one at the school used for MIDI was an actual IBM PC with two drives. We’d boot up on A: and save our projects on B:. :)

    • Oisteink@lemmy.world
      2·
      8 days ago

      I’ve had both. Also you could use b: as a substitute for a: if you had only one drrive. It would then ask you yo insert a disk before accessing

    • Steve@startrek.website
      2·
      8 days ago

      I had an 8086 with a 5.25 and a 3.5”. You could always change their assignments in the bios if you wanted

    • hawgietonight@lemmy.world
      2·
      8 days ago

      The b: drive was usually used to speed up a disk copy, especially to multiple copies, it was way faster than swapping out the disks. Remember that sometimes the whole contents of a disk didn’t fit in available memory. There was a lot of disk swapping.

      You could also just keep the msdos disk in a: and execute software from b: Also sometimes a command required reading from the msdos disk. It was handy to have the boot disk always available.

      I don’t recall using any software that specifically required two drives, but no doubt it existed.

        • Kratzkopf@discuss.tchncs.de
          8·
          7 days ago

          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.

          • heartSagan5@lemmy.zip
            2·
            7 days ago

            It’s probably a replication on our languages.

            For example, in Swedish… it’s spelled telefon, not telephone. I was trying to think of a word, where in Swedish, it’s a k whereas in English, it’s a c. Ah, yes - katten for cat, as in felix.

            Did you know that laser, as in laser disc, is likely from the Swedish word läser, which means to read.

            • Bluescluestoothpaste@sh.itjust.works
              2·
              5 days ago

              LASER is actually an acronym “light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation”

              But i have no idea if there was any swedish influence on the people who came up with name