Isn't it time to get rid of the A: drive?
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Or at least re-purpose the letter? How many people really need a floppy disk anymore? Or, more useless, the B: drive which sees even less use than A:. With all the drives I already have mapped to at least five disk drives, two CD drives, any number of USB drives that only want to map to the first drive they had available and lawd knows how many drives on other workstations in the house I'm beginning to feel the need for an extended alphabet. At the office I have to constantly map drives to campus servers and mail servers to have quick access to the systems I support. Why not move the CD drive designations down to A: and B:? Who's had to boot from a floppy of late to install a new system or software package? Can't a recovery disk be created on a USB drive?
I'm not a programmer but I play one at the office
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Or at least re-purpose the letter? How many people really need a floppy disk anymore? Or, more useless, the B: drive which sees even less use than A:. With all the drives I already have mapped to at least five disk drives, two CD drives, any number of USB drives that only want to map to the first drive they had available and lawd knows how many drives on other workstations in the house I'm beginning to feel the need for an extended alphabet. At the office I have to constantly map drives to campus servers and mail servers to have quick access to the systems I support. Why not move the CD drive designations down to A: and B:? Who's had to boot from a floppy of late to install a new system or software package? Can't a recovery disk be created on a USB drive?
I'm not a programmer but I play one at the office
In principle I agree with your sentiment. However, I think that 100 years from now, a child will ask his teacher, "How come we never have an A or B drive?" and the teacher will begin to relate the story of the humble floppy disk.
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Or at least re-purpose the letter? How many people really need a floppy disk anymore? Or, more useless, the B: drive which sees even less use than A:. With all the drives I already have mapped to at least five disk drives, two CD drives, any number of USB drives that only want to map to the first drive they had available and lawd knows how many drives on other workstations in the house I'm beginning to feel the need for an extended alphabet. At the office I have to constantly map drives to campus servers and mail servers to have quick access to the systems I support. Why not move the CD drive designations down to A: and B:? Who's had to boot from a floppy of late to install a new system or software package? Can't a recovery disk be created on a USB drive?
I'm not a programmer but I play one at the office
I don't agree. Moving C,D,E down two positions in the alphabet would upset a lot of existing stuff. Yes, A and B are free on most systems, however there is nothing preventing you from using them; I have one USB memory stick that mounts as B: on every system I know, and that has worked well for me all over the years, whether the system has or doesn't have a floppy on A: FYI: on most versions of Windows you can force a USB memory stick to a fixed letter (assuming it is free). :)
Luc Pattyn [Forum Guidelines] [Why QA sucks] [My Articles] Nil Volentibus Arduum
Please use <PRE> tags for code snippets, they preserve indentation, and improve readability.
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Or at least re-purpose the letter? How many people really need a floppy disk anymore? Or, more useless, the B: drive which sees even less use than A:. With all the drives I already have mapped to at least five disk drives, two CD drives, any number of USB drives that only want to map to the first drive they had available and lawd knows how many drives on other workstations in the house I'm beginning to feel the need for an extended alphabet. At the office I have to constantly map drives to campus servers and mail servers to have quick access to the systems I support. Why not move the CD drive designations down to A: and B:? Who's had to boot from a floppy of late to install a new system or software package? Can't a recovery disk be created on a USB drive?
I'm not a programmer but I play one at the office
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Or at least re-purpose the letter? How many people really need a floppy disk anymore? Or, more useless, the B: drive which sees even less use than A:. With all the drives I already have mapped to at least five disk drives, two CD drives, any number of USB drives that only want to map to the first drive they had available and lawd knows how many drives on other workstations in the house I'm beginning to feel the need for an extended alphabet. At the office I have to constantly map drives to campus servers and mail servers to have quick access to the systems I support. Why not move the CD drive designations down to A: and B:? Who's had to boot from a floppy of late to install a new system or software package? Can't a recovery disk be created on a USB drive?
I'm not a programmer but I play one at the office
No. In fact, it should be made compulsory for all those trying to enter the IT industry to spend the first three years installing and running all packages from floppy1. This would teach them what we had to go through as the applications bloated out of control. Anyone producing software that needs two DVDs to install a word processor, say, should have their CD/DVD/Download privileges removed for a month. 1 That should about get XP installed, if they hurry.
Real men don't use instructions. They are only the manufacturers opinion on how to put the thing together.
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Or at least re-purpose the letter? How many people really need a floppy disk anymore? Or, more useless, the B: drive which sees even less use than A:. With all the drives I already have mapped to at least five disk drives, two CD drives, any number of USB drives that only want to map to the first drive they had available and lawd knows how many drives on other workstations in the house I'm beginning to feel the need for an extended alphabet. At the office I have to constantly map drives to campus servers and mail servers to have quick access to the systems I support. Why not move the CD drive designations down to A: and B:? Who's had to boot from a floppy of late to install a new system or software package? Can't a recovery disk be created on a USB drive?
I'm not a programmer but I play one at the office
PRESS PLAY ON TAPE
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Or at least re-purpose the letter? How many people really need a floppy disk anymore? Or, more useless, the B: drive which sees even less use than A:. With all the drives I already have mapped to at least five disk drives, two CD drives, any number of USB drives that only want to map to the first drive they had available and lawd knows how many drives on other workstations in the house I'm beginning to feel the need for an extended alphabet. At the office I have to constantly map drives to campus servers and mail servers to have quick access to the systems I support. Why not move the CD drive designations down to A: and B:? Who's had to boot from a floppy of late to install a new system or software package? Can't a recovery disk be created on a USB drive?
I'm not a programmer but I play one at the office
Lilith.C wrote:
floppy
What's that? ;P
The funniest thing about this particular signature is that by the time you realise it doesn't say anything it's too late to stop reading it. My latest tip/trick - Silverlight *.XCP files. Visit the Hindi forum here.
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I don't agree. Moving C,D,E down two positions in the alphabet would upset a lot of existing stuff. Yes, A and B are free on most systems, however there is nothing preventing you from using them; I have one USB memory stick that mounts as B: on every system I know, and that has worked well for me all over the years, whether the system has or doesn't have a floppy on A: FYI: on most versions of Windows you can force a USB memory stick to a fixed letter (assuming it is free). :)
Luc Pattyn [Forum Guidelines] [Why QA sucks] [My Articles] Nil Volentibus Arduum
Please use <PRE> tags for code snippets, they preserve indentation, and improve readability.
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Or at least re-purpose the letter? How many people really need a floppy disk anymore? Or, more useless, the B: drive which sees even less use than A:. With all the drives I already have mapped to at least five disk drives, two CD drives, any number of USB drives that only want to map to the first drive they had available and lawd knows how many drives on other workstations in the house I'm beginning to feel the need for an extended alphabet. At the office I have to constantly map drives to campus servers and mail servers to have quick access to the systems I support. Why not move the CD drive designations down to A: and B:? Who's had to boot from a floppy of late to install a new system or software package? Can't a recovery disk be created on a USB drive?
I'm not a programmer but I play one at the office
yeah I've often felt the same thing. I think if you boot from a USB stick the stick may be mounted as A: though but think that's the only place I've seen it used for a long time. I've no floppy in my existing system since the FDD connector on the motherboard is right at the base of the rear and I'd need a very long FDD cable to get anywhere near the drive - and the cable is something else to block airflow etc unless I get an even longer one that can be stuck to the sides etc. My last system didn't have a floppy drive either as it was small form factor and there just wasn't any space for one. Personally I've never liked the alphabetic naming system anyway. I prefer the one used on the Amiga, DF0 for the 1st floppy, DF1 for the 2nd floppy etc. Then DH0 for the first hard disk, another range for optical disks (cant remember if it was DC0 or CD0) etc. Plus aliases like SYS: for the boot device, Libs: for the folder containing the equivalent of DLLs, C: for the folder containing the AmigaDOS command programs like copy, delete etc and any custom aliases you wanted to set up using the alias command.
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Or at least re-purpose the letter? How many people really need a floppy disk anymore? Or, more useless, the B: drive which sees even less use than A:. With all the drives I already have mapped to at least five disk drives, two CD drives, any number of USB drives that only want to map to the first drive they had available and lawd knows how many drives on other workstations in the house I'm beginning to feel the need for an extended alphabet. At the office I have to constantly map drives to campus servers and mail servers to have quick access to the systems I support. Why not move the CD drive designations down to A: and B:? Who's had to boot from a floppy of late to install a new system or software package? Can't a recovery disk be created on a USB drive?
I'm not a programmer but I play one at the office
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Or at least re-purpose the letter? How many people really need a floppy disk anymore? Or, more useless, the B: drive which sees even less use than A:. With all the drives I already have mapped to at least five disk drives, two CD drives, any number of USB drives that only want to map to the first drive they had available and lawd knows how many drives on other workstations in the house I'm beginning to feel the need for an extended alphabet. At the office I have to constantly map drives to campus servers and mail servers to have quick access to the systems I support. Why not move the CD drive designations down to A: and B:? Who's had to boot from a floppy of late to install a new system or software package? Can't a recovery disk be created on a USB drive?
I'm not a programmer but I play one at the office
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The article says: This mostly affects computers built before about 1999, which were designed to boot only from floppy drive. In fact, for modern computers "no emulation" mode is generally the more reliable method. If you're still running a PC older than eleven years then you deserve to be stuck with a floppy. Over the years I'd accumulated literally hundreds of floppies, mostly containing pictures I'd downloaded from that newfangled Internet. A couple of months ago I decided to get them out of the way and went through all of them and scrubbed them clean before boxing them up. I kept a few that had some MIDI files I wanted to play with but all in all even the few utility programs I carried around on them are so 20th century. The MIDI files were scrubbed after copying them to a USB drive.
I'm not a programmer but I play one at the office
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yeah I've often felt the same thing. I think if you boot from a USB stick the stick may be mounted as A: though but think that's the only place I've seen it used for a long time. I've no floppy in my existing system since the FDD connector on the motherboard is right at the base of the rear and I'd need a very long FDD cable to get anywhere near the drive - and the cable is something else to block airflow etc unless I get an even longer one that can be stuck to the sides etc. My last system didn't have a floppy drive either as it was small form factor and there just wasn't any space for one. Personally I've never liked the alphabetic naming system anyway. I prefer the one used on the Amiga, DF0 for the 1st floppy, DF1 for the 2nd floppy etc. Then DH0 for the first hard disk, another range for optical disks (cant remember if it was DC0 or CD0) etc. Plus aliases like SYS: for the boot device, Libs: for the folder containing the equivalent of DLLs, C: for the folder containing the AmigaDOS command programs like copy, delete etc and any custom aliases you wanted to set up using the alias command.
I'm not sure about booting from a USB stick. My roommate tried it but the drivers weren't available. Hmmmm. May be time to check to see if they're even selling floppies or how many they're carrying on the shelves.
I'm not a programmer but I play one at the office
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PIEBALDconsult wrote:
That's so '90s, get with the times, just use a UNC[^].
Generally I do that were appropriate. Most of my programs accept UNC and store the path in that manner when it's entered that way. I prefer it. But much of what I do is performed from the command prompt and typing in UNC paths becomes a bit tedious and time consuming when you're trying to do a directory listing or open a file in a timely manner. Batch files? Sure if it's something I have to repeat on a daily basis.
I'm not a programmer but I play one at the office
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Or at least re-purpose the letter? How many people really need a floppy disk anymore? Or, more useless, the B: drive which sees even less use than A:. With all the drives I already have mapped to at least five disk drives, two CD drives, any number of USB drives that only want to map to the first drive they had available and lawd knows how many drives on other workstations in the house I'm beginning to feel the need for an extended alphabet. At the office I have to constantly map drives to campus servers and mail servers to have quick access to the systems I support. Why not move the CD drive designations down to A: and B:? Who's had to boot from a floppy of late to install a new system or software package? Can't a recovery disk be created on a USB drive?
I'm not a programmer but I play one at the office
As someone who was around when floppies were the best thing going, the idea of seeing the statement "Booting from disk A..." on a more modern system gives me nightmares. How many "Please insert disk n" messages would there be for XP, Vista, and Weven? Surrounded by piles and piles of discs that get higher and higher, stretching to infinity... "Please insert disk n" "Please insert disk n" ... <shudder>
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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As someone who was around when floppies were the best thing going, the idea of seeing the statement "Booting from disk A..." on a more modern system gives me nightmares. How many "Please insert disk n" messages would there be for XP, Vista, and Weven? Surrounded by piles and piles of discs that get higher and higher, stretching to infinity... "Please insert disk n" "Please insert disk n" ... <shudder>
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Just yesterday I got "Invalid boot disk" and thought my system disk had gotten corrupted. It took a while before I realized I'd left a disk in A: from cleaning out my unneeded stock of floppies.
I'm not a programmer but I play one at the office
I've never had a corrupted system.
(But i'm saying nothing about the content of the HDDs!)
