Whippersnapper drive letters
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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.
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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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
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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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
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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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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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
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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Multi-file zips! Problem solved! :laugh: God, that takes me back. :sigh:
Our Forgotten Astronomy | Object Oriented Programming with C++ | Wordle solver
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.exewas 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; -
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:
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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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
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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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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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:
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:
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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.exewas 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;Sounds joyous! /s
Our Forgotten Astronomy | Object Oriented Programming with C++ | Wordle solver