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[–] 7 points 6 days ago (23 children)
  • [–] 48 points 6 days ago (6 children)

    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:\ and C:\ without B:\).

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  • [–] 27 points 6 days ago (2 children)

    Also it was a lot more religious than the post implies.

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  • [–] 4 points 5 days ago (1 child)

    The BIOS part is not correct but that's nitpicking. Also omits the second coming of floppies through ZIP drives.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 days ago

    And LS-120 drives, which were so much the second coming of floppies that they could also read regular 3.5" floppies while making an alarming screeching noise the entire time to sweeten the deal.

    ...I still have three of them someplace. I definitely have a box of LS-120 disks somewhere, too.

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  • [–] 16 points 6 days ago

    "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".

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  • [–] 11 points 6 days ago (11 children)

    Yes, a and b were floppy drives and are “reserved” insomuch as C:\ is the default for compatibility reasons.

    A and B were floppy

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  • [–] [S] 14 points 6 days ago (8 children)

    Remember that weird period of zip disks?

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  • [–] 9 points 6 days ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 5 points 6 days ago* (1 child)

    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.

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  • 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.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 days ago (1 child)

    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?

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  • [–] 3 points 5 days ago

    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.

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  • [–] 10 points 5 days ago

    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.

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  • [–] 7 points 6 days ago

    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.

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