Post by @FenrirIII@lemmy.world

"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."

Open ##5479921

@MissingGhost@lemmy.ml 2026-11-04 14:57

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

Open ##5480100

@Sanctus@anarchist.nexus 2026-11-04 14:57

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

Open ##5480105

@yetAnotherUser@lemmy.ca 2026-11-04 15:12

Why are some of the letters in the text weirdly “elongated”?

Open ##5480209

@elevenbones@sh.itjust.works 2026-11-04 15:25

C:[Enter]###

Open ##5480297

@nullPointer@programming.dev 2026-11-04 15:49

ah the glory says of sierra games.

Open ##5480419

@daychilde@lemmy.world 2026-11-04 15:50

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.

Open ##5480427

@sheepishly@fedia.io 2026-11-04 17:42

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

Open ##5481237

@MehBlah@lemmy.world 2026-11-04 18:10

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

Open ##5481400

@Knoxvomica@lemmy.ca 2026-11-04 18:22

Praise the omnisiah

Open ##5481509

@LodeMike@lemmy.today 2026-11-04 18:38

I still can’t get over that windows boxes can’t have more than 23 drives connected, excluding C. Just absolutely hilarious ineptitude. Similarly the case insensitive filesystem makes it so the vast majority of file operations don’t work [in all cases like they should].

Open ##5481648

@MrOtingocni@lemmy.world 2026-11-04 19:16

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.

Open ##5481920

@banazir@lemmy.ml 2026-11-04 19:16

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.

Open ##5481921

@the_riviera_kid@lemmy.world 2026-11-04 21:38

I always label my secondary and tertiary drive A and B these days

Open ##5482879

@matlag@sh.itjust.works 2026-11-04 23:09

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!

Open ##5483308

@Psythik@lemmy.world 2026-11-04 23:24

For once the question was actually dumb. Kids these days don’t know about the dual-floppy setup that ruled the world until hard drives became affordable.

Open ##5483386

@huquad@lemmy.ml 2026-11-04 23:37

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

Open ##5483435

@phailhaus@piefed.social 2026-11-05 00:01

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.

Open ##5483529

@Bluescluestoothpaste@sh.itjust.works 2026-11-05 00:41

And the CD-ROM drive was D:

Open ##5483851

@phoenixz@lemmy.ca 2026-11-05 00:58

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: /

Open ##5483871

@HexesofVexes@lemmy.world 2026-11-05 02:00

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.

Open ##5483919

@MonkeMischief@lemmy.today 2026-11-05 02:18

Anyone: “In the beginning…” My Freakin’ Brain: “Inne de beninng-ing.”

Open ##5483992

@OnASnowyEvening@lemmy.world 2026-11-05 03:24

I got you, OP… C:\DOS C:\DOS\RUN RUN\DOS\RUN

Open ##5484162

@Echolynx@lemmy.zip 2026-11-05 06:35

I need a historical fantasy book in this concept.

Open ##5484773

@rmuk@feddit.uk 2026-11-05 10:50

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 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.

Open ##5485542

@Mr_Dr_Oink@lemmy.world 2026-11-05 11:07

I remember the first computer my family had, when i was around 5 hears old, was an old IBM something with a laborious switch to power it on. Like a flick switch that pulled a metal rod, i dont know the specifics but this rod must have moved something to complete and electrical circuit and the thing came to life. It had 1 floppy drive and a blanker for a second. A: and B: were reserved for these drives. Windows 3.11 was installed from 12 floppy disks and we ran all of our games from DOS. Except lemmings which was built into the OS. The box was horizontal, that classic beige colour and had the classic IBM 2 button mouse. No speakers. No modem. A 12 inch crt screen (in matching beige) We had a dot matrix printer that we never replaced the ink ribbon for. So after that ran dry we just used the paper for drawing on. I miss that machine.

Open ##5485603

@grainOfSalt@sh.itjust.works 2026-11-05 12:05

The upper letters have also lost their use with UNC paths. in the 2000’s and 2010’s, we had so many drive letters at my workplaces. I hardly used any of them, but they still mapped a bunch. Now they’re on NAS drives or SharePoint, which you can just access without mapping. I still have an F: drive on my current company machine for some reason. It used to be a network home directory backup, but after OneDrive, I’m not sure where it points or why it still exists. Because I’m the sort of person who sees a YouTube video about what happened to Novell Netware and I say “ooh” and click play, I recently learned that F: was the typical home drive letter for Novell Netware, with company/departmental share drives starting with G: or later. (support.novell.com/docs/Tids/…/10027779.html) I remember int he early 2000’s people still calling those drives and the login screen “Novell” even though it was Windows NT and NT shares by that point.

Open ##5485827

@heartSagan5@lemmy.zip 2026-11-05 19:34

And then there’s Linux, no pondering about media before, it just cares which it found after another on each interface upon boot.

Open ##5487507

Replies (36)