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Whippersnapper drive letters

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  • J jmaida

    Ah, the past returns with interest.

    "A little time, a little trouble, your better day" Badfinger

    D Offline
    D Offline
    David ONeil
    wrote on last edited by
    #3

    Multi-file zips! Problem solved! :laugh: God, that takes me back. :sigh:

    Our Forgotten Astronomy | Object Oriented Programming with C++ | Wordle solver

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    • E englebart

      My barely adult child likes to map network drives on A:. Old Timer/me: You are going to regret that if you try to copy any file sets larger than 1.44 MB. Inspired by the earlier E: vs F: post

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      D Offline
      David ONeil
      wrote on last edited by
      #4

      Multi-file zips! Problem solved! :laugh: God, that takes me back. :sigh:

      Our Forgotten Astronomy | Object Oriented Programming with C++ | Wordle solver

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      • D David ONeil

        Multi-file zips! Problem solved! :laugh: God, that takes me back. :sigh:

        Our Forgotten Astronomy | Object Oriented Programming with C++ | Wordle solver

        E Offline
        E Offline
        englebart
        wrote on last edited by
        #5

        Save icon has been a rock to the memory of floppy disks. To replace the floppy save icon, they will have to revert to the briefcase or go more modern with a backpack.

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        • E englebart

          My barely adult child likes to map network drives on A:. Old Timer/me: You are going to regret that if you try to copy any file sets larger than 1.44 MB. Inspired by the earlier E: vs F: post

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          trønderen
          wrote on last edited by
          #6

          englebart wrote:

          You are going to regret that if you try to copy any file sets larger than 1.44 MB.

          There were 2.88 Mbyte floppies as well (not very common). That would half the problem.

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          • E englebart

            My barely adult child likes to map network drives on A:. Old Timer/me: You are going to regret that if you try to copy any file sets larger than 1.44 MB. Inspired by the earlier E: vs F: post

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            R Offline
            Ron Anders
            wrote on last edited by
            #7

            Sheeoot, I cut my teeth on 360k floppies. The AT class bullies had 1.2mb 5.25" drives and thought they were so big. On my DAW I mapped the backup USB drive to B: Felt weird, looks weird, um, seems ok so far.

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            • R Ron Anders

              Sheeoot, I cut my teeth on 360k floppies. The AT class bullies had 1.2mb 5.25" drives and thought they were so big. On my DAW I mapped the backup USB drive to B: Felt weird, looks weird, um, seems ok so far.

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              englebart
              wrote on last edited by
              #8

              We had a cannibalized chassis with two 1.2MB floppies, no hard drive. We used it to boot Windows for Workgroups 3.1 so we could play network Hearts card games against each other.

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              • E englebart

                Save icon has been a rock to the memory of floppy disks. To replace the floppy save icon, they will have to revert to the briefcase or go more modern with a backpack.

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                dandy72
                wrote on last edited by
                #9

                I once experimented with "updating" my own load/save toolbar buttons using a variety of USB stick and hard drive icons, with arrows pointing into (save) or away from them (load). Turned out to be confusing even for those who have never *seen* a floppy disk, and I ended up reverting to the tried-and-true. I think we're stuck with it forever. :-)

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                • E englebart

                  My barely adult child likes to map network drives on A:. Old Timer/me: You are going to regret that if you try to copy any file sets larger than 1.44 MB. Inspired by the earlier E: vs F: post

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                  D Offline
                  dandy72
                  wrote on last edited by
                  #10

                  I don't think the OS imposes any restriction on the use of drives A: and B: for any purpose. I'm looking at an ancient Win7 VM right now, which uses B: to host SQL database backups. Never in its lifetime has any software complained about anything unusual.

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                  • E englebart

                    My barely adult child likes to map network drives on A:. Old Timer/me: You are going to regret that if you try to copy any file sets larger than 1.44 MB. Inspired by the earlier E: vs F: post

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                    Jeremy Falcon
                    wrote on last edited by
                    #11

                    Back in our day, we had to carry our floppy disks through 5 miles of snow. And we liked it that way!

                    Jeremy Falcon

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                    • D David ONeil

                      Multi-file zips! Problem solved! :laugh: God, that takes me back. :sigh:

                      Our Forgotten Astronomy | Object Oriented Programming with C++ | Wordle solver

                      K Offline
                      K Offline
                      Kate X257
                      wrote on last edited by
                      #12

                      Wait I'm not that old yet. Right? Guys?

                      D 1 Reply Last reply
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                      • E englebart

                        My barely adult child likes to map network drives on A:. Old Timer/me: You are going to regret that if you try to copy any file sets larger than 1.44 MB. Inspired by the earlier E: vs F: post

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                        B Offline
                        BryanFazekas
                        wrote on last edited by
                        #13

                        IIRC, MS-DOS had A and B hardwired to be floppy disks, as there wasn't anything else. A was the boot disk and B was data -- IF you were lucky enough to have ***2*** floppy drives!!! ;P When hard drives became common, they were always mapped to C, since A and B were reserved. When CD drives became common, they were always mapped as D -- I have no idea if that was a requirement or just a popular convention. In the 90's I was on as many as 5 projects in a year (all different clients) and every client had the same mappings. Today? Laptops come configured with C as the boot disk. AFAIK it's not a requirement under Windows, so it's probably 30+ years of convention. When I rebuilt my desktop a year ago, I mapped the M.2 boot disk as C, while D is the files SSD, and E is a hot SSD backup. It never occurred to me to map the boot drive to anything other than C. :laugh:

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                        • K Kate X257

                          Wait I'm not that old yet. Right? Guys?

                          D Offline
                          D Offline
                          David ONeil
                          wrote on last edited by
                          #14

                          [Lunatic Fringe](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqUa\_G1h3pw)

                          Our Forgotten Astronomy | Object Oriented Programming with C++ | Wordle solver

                          1 Reply Last reply
                          0
                          • D David ONeil

                            Multi-file zips! Problem solved! :laugh: God, that takes me back. :sigh:

                            Our Forgotten Astronomy | Object Oriented Programming with C++ | Wordle solver

                            G Offline
                            G Offline
                            Gary Wheeler
                            wrote on last edited by
                            #15

                            David O'Neil wrote:

                            Multi-file zips! Problem solved!

                            True **war** story: Our product installs are rather large, so we used to distribute them to our field service folks as ZIP files. Some of them would forget to unZIP them with the proper options, so I made them self-extracting ZIP's. One of the variants of our current product includes some rather large test data, so it's .exe was a little over 5GB. It turns out Windows 10 x64 and Windows 11 won't run executables larger than 4GB. Back to ZIP files we go... :doh:

                            Software Zen: delete this;

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                            • B BryanFazekas

                              IIRC, MS-DOS had A and B hardwired to be floppy disks, as there wasn't anything else. A was the boot disk and B was data -- IF you were lucky enough to have ***2*** floppy drives!!! ;P When hard drives became common, they were always mapped to C, since A and B were reserved. When CD drives became common, they were always mapped as D -- I have no idea if that was a requirement or just a popular convention. In the 90's I was on as many as 5 projects in a year (all different clients) and every client had the same mappings. Today? Laptops come configured with C as the boot disk. AFAIK it's not a requirement under Windows, so it's probably 30+ years of convention. When I rebuilt my desktop a year ago, I mapped the M.2 boot disk as C, while D is the files SSD, and E is a hot SSD backup. It never occurred to me to map the boot drive to anything other than C. :laugh:

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                              D Offline
                              dandy72
                              wrote on last edited by
                              #16

                              BryanFazekas wrote:

                              Today? Laptops come configured with C as the boot disk. AFAIK it's not a requirement under Windows, so it's probably 30+ years of convention.

                              I believe at one point in time it was possible to install Windows on a hard drive that wasn't necessarily C:...in fact I distinctly remember seeing Windows 2000 installed on a drive E: somewhere - OS files were on E:\Windows, E:\Program Files, etc. I think this broke a lot of bad assumptions from poorly thought-out apps, and nowadays to avoid that you can ONLY install the OS on drive C:. It's been a while I've seen any option in Windows installers that would leave me to believe you have any sort of choice. But still, any code I write that needs to know always queries the system even for the most basic things, rather than assuming C: even exists at all.

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                              • E englebart

                                My barely adult child likes to map network drives on A:. Old Timer/me: You are going to regret that if you try to copy any file sets larger than 1.44 MB. Inspired by the earlier E: vs F: post

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                                M Offline
                                milo xml
                                wrote on last edited by
                                #17

                                One of our vendors has a camera calibration program that looks on a floppy drive for the files to do the validation. I got sick of carrying the floppy everywhere and mapped the A: drive to a server and disabled the floppy drive in Device Manager. :-\ Looks weird, feels weird, but works. :thumbsup:

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                                • D David ONeil

                                  Multi-file zips! Problem solved! :laugh: God, that takes me back. :sigh:

                                  Our Forgotten Astronomy | Object Oriented Programming with C++ | Wordle solver

                                  W Offline
                                  W Offline
                                  WPerkins
                                  wrote on last edited by
                                  #18

                                  ARJ, my favorite archiver was ARJ.

                                  1 Reply Last reply
                                  0
                                  • B BryanFazekas

                                    IIRC, MS-DOS had A and B hardwired to be floppy disks, as there wasn't anything else. A was the boot disk and B was data -- IF you were lucky enough to have ***2*** floppy drives!!! ;P When hard drives became common, they were always mapped to C, since A and B were reserved. When CD drives became common, they were always mapped as D -- I have no idea if that was a requirement or just a popular convention. In the 90's I was on as many as 5 projects in a year (all different clients) and every client had the same mappings. Today? Laptops come configured with C as the boot disk. AFAIK it's not a requirement under Windows, so it's probably 30+ years of convention. When I rebuilt my desktop a year ago, I mapped the M.2 boot disk as C, while D is the files SSD, and E is a hot SSD backup. It never occurred to me to map the boot drive to anything other than C. :laugh:

                                    T Offline
                                    T Offline
                                    Tiger12506
                                    wrote on last edited by
                                    #19

                                    BryanFazekas wrote:

                                    When CD drives became common, they were always mapped as D -- I have no idea if that was a requirement or just a popular convention.

                                    Just convention. I had a Win98 machine that came with two cd drives (one a burner) and they were on M: and N:

                                    1 Reply Last reply
                                    0
                                    • G Gary Wheeler

                                      David O'Neil wrote:

                                      Multi-file zips! Problem solved!

                                      True **war** story: Our product installs are rather large, so we used to distribute them to our field service folks as ZIP files. Some of them would forget to unZIP them with the proper options, so I made them self-extracting ZIP's. One of the variants of our current product includes some rather large test data, so it's .exe was a little over 5GB. It turns out Windows 10 x64 and Windows 11 won't run executables larger than 4GB. Back to ZIP files we go... :doh:

                                      Software Zen: delete this;

                                      D Offline
                                      D Offline
                                      David ONeil
                                      wrote on last edited by
                                      #20

                                      Sounds joyous! /s

                                      Our Forgotten Astronomy | Object Oriented Programming with C++ | Wordle solver

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