I had A: and B: back in the days.
not me with my
/dev/sda
/dev/sdA
Drive letters?
Yeah, I always thought the drive letters weren’t a very elegant solution to the problem. Can have only 26 devices. Should just use numbers. You can fit 256 devices in one-byte integer identifier! Like how tape drive is 1 and printer is 4 and floppy drives are 8, 9 and so on.
spoiler
In windows you can mount drives as folders to get around this
OMV (NAS OS based on Debian) assigns each drive a UUID and mounts them under that. It takes a bit time to get used to, but already paid off when I had to shuffle around drives and cards cause of an upgrade.
Fun thing, when you attach a USB floppy drive on a modern Windows 11 system, it’ll dutifully give it drive letter A: and even has a floppy drive icon. (Which admittedly doesn’t look like a floppy drive. At all. But it has a floppy!)
And why yes, I’ve seen it a time or two in recent years, because I’ve been archiving some stuff. Imaging shitloads of old floppies.
Every Windows is built on every generation before it. All sorts of legacy stuff is hidden and embedded inside that still works that’s useless. Dialer.exe still runs from the Run cmd. Com/LPT1 stuff should still be there for old printers.
I personally don’t have the heart to say any of the legacy support stuff is completely useless. I mean, yeah, Windows has support for floppy drives (through standard USB mass storage), but you know what? I can image old floppies through it. If Windows recognises floppy drives and gives it drive letter A, that’s not that much of bloat really, just an entry in a list or something.
And also most Linux distributions also have ancient-ass legacy stuff, though admittedly usually you need to specifically install it and maybe even hack a bit to get it to work again. …why yes, I am going to do physical terminal stuff one day, 1980s style, and I’ll be very mad if I need to hack serial getty support in the hard way!
To be fair, you occasionally need to “hack” Linux a bit to get modern stuff working, too
Yeah and if you put a second one it’s B:. At least on my slowly dying 7 machine.
My disk was a floppy until you walked by. Now it’s solid state.
Oh yeah, that reminds me of that time SO’s PC had
C:for the OS andD:for data and wanted to format it, so i booted it to DOS (i think it was still win 98 SE) and happily formattedC:only to discover that in DOS i was actually formattingD:… fun times.I set my memory card reader to the letter A, but I also have my old Lightscribe DVD drive (and looking for one optical drive for my ThinkPad), and have a few floppy drives put away for potential hobby projects.
Sorry, been busy
Stuff to do.
I think I still have a few 3 1/2" and even 5 1/4" around here somewhere. I even had a 120mb Superdisk drive. I bought it used and got 4 or 5 years of use from it. It could hold 1000’s of CNC programs and even CAD drawings.
***Great Googlely Moogely! You can still get Super disks on eBay!
Brrrrr ck
Cachk-cachk
Nrrrrrrrrrr
Yeah i can hear that drive letter 35 years after the fact
I miss floppies. Putting them in and taking them out was so satisfying. Remember when you had to install stuff with like a hundred of them? The ker-chicks and that smooth sliding feel as the sheath slid open…
Theme Park came on 8 floppies, was my first game.
If Rollercoaster Tycoon was more of a tycoon/business game…
I try to play it on occasion out of nostalgia, but it has so much jank! Haha
Ahhh yes. Sitting there drinking tea and flippin’ floppies for half an hour or even longer. And there was always that one that would read well.
I had reason to use an optical drive lately, and even that was a blast from the past. Hitting eject, watching the light blink and then the drawer opens. USB-based storage just isn’t the same.
I regularly use optical drives for the movies. Why should I pay twice the price to “buy” some movie from Apple or Google? I rather wait 2 days for the mailman to deliver me a Blu-ray that doesn’t only have better quality, but also keeps working when some company decides to stop licensing the stuff I purportedly “bought”. Second-hand discs sometimes cost as much as 1€.
But well, I might be a bit old school, as I just got a few new vinyls delivered to me the other day.
Something I recently learned: it is outright impossible to legally play 4k blu rays on PC.
When you’re old enough to buy physical media, your eyes have gone bad enough that you don’t need 4k 8-)
Funnily enough, the main place I worry about resolution is on a desktop computer doing desktop computer stuff. My 1440p ultrawide is kind of decadent for games, but when I’m doing something I just want a bunch of real estate.
Just watching TV or movies…honestly I think I might like lower resolutions more. I’ve got a copy of Master and Commander on “fullscreen” DVD, 480p 4:3. I’d really like it to be 16:9 but I can’t come up with complaints about the video quality. I get immersed in that movie just fine at DVD quality. I’ve got a few films on Blu-Ray, and at 1080p film grain starts being noticeable. And the graininess of the shot changes from scene to scene as the film crew had to use different film stock and camera settings for different lighting conditions, so I spend the whole movie going “That scene looks pretty good, oh that’s grainy as hell, now it’s better.” Lower resolutions and/or bitrates smooth that out, but I think they actively preserve it on Blu-Ray because the data fits on the disc, there’s no internet pipe to push it down, and film grain is “authentic.”
So at 4k, it’s either going to display a level of detail that I’m sitting too far from the screen to notice, it’s going to look even noisier, or it’ll be smeared by compression rather than resolution because of bitrate limitations. So…?
i still kinda like the big floppy design. It just looks like it means business.
THIS IS THE SHIT! GIMME A HELL YEAH! THE FUTURE IS HERRE!!!
I still have my tape drive.
I’m glad my punch tape drive is long gone. We used a paper punch tape reel to reel on a garden cart to wheel around the shop floor to load CNC programs onto CNC mills. Often with hand written gcode. Gods, I hated that thing. Floppies were far faster and far more reliable.
If you’re not setting emojis as your drive letters, you’re living in the past.
Incidentally, don’t open the 😳: drive
😈
🦫🐈🐇🦇🦋🌮🦪
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)Fav drive
