We still pay homage to the old gods with the "save" icon

"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."

Windows people are starting to name their ssd a: and b:

It's horrible

‘Dances with ribbons of mainframe tape’

Rise ye old ones RISE

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:

/

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

But they were, all of them, deceived, for another drive was made.

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

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.

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?

And the CD-ROM drive was D:

I need a historical fantasy book in this concept.

TIL.

I was small when 5.25 floppies we're around. Never even questioned "C:"

I got you, OP…

C:\DOS

C:\DOS\RUN

RUN\DOS\RUN

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!

I was there, Gandalf.

My first computer was Tandy. 8088 chip, I think. Orange monochrome monitor. No hard drive, 2x 5.25 floppers. Folks' co-worker asked if anyone wanted it before tossing it out.

I'm not quite that old, though, there were the Apple IIs in the school lab.

I learned my first bit of programming right then, figuring out batch files. Everything had to be saved on disc immediately.

Man I was living the high life because this Tandy had a 2400 baud modem and I was soon acquainted with the wild world of BBSs.

I didn't care that it was in monochrome because playing Usurper or Trade Wars with strangers on someone's computer half a state away was way way cooler than the Nintendo, ha ha.

Man those were such good times.

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.

But what of the fabled and cursed other, D: drive?

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.

Why are some of the letters in the text weirdly "elongated"?

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.

Praise the omnisiah

i like to pretend the C stands for computer and that's why

Simple A: and B: were reserved for floppies and when hard drives came along C: was the next letter. There now you know..

Anyone: "In the beginning..."

My Freakin' Brain: "Inne de beninng-ing."

You know… someone somewhere MUST have built a system using two floppies and, like, a CD drive or something.

Also, trivial fact while I'm here that some may not know about: If your system only had one physical floppy, you could still use A: and B:. When you switched, it would prompt you (iirc) to swap the diskettes.

Damn A and B are just like El and Baal fr fr

C:[Enter]###

ah the glory days of sierra games.