• HexesofVexes@lemmy.world
    31·
    7 days ago

    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.

  • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
    28·
    7 days ago

    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, the one true god:

    /

  • tigerhawkvok@startrek.websiteEnglish
    15·
    6 days ago

    I mean I purchased an external floppy for my undergrad laptop as recently as… 2004… Oh shit that was 22 years ago… Fuck a kid born a year later can legally buy alcohol and a kid born then is graduating from undergraduate…

    When did I get old?

    • RobotsLeftHand@lemmy.world
      5·
      6 days ago

      I remember building a computer in 2004 and finally making the decision to not include a floppy drive since I had just been booting from the CD drive for the past couple of issues anyways.

      I was reminded of this several years later when I made the decision not to include a disk drive in my latest build.

  • egregiousRac@piefed.socialEnglish
    18·
    7 days ago

    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.

        • Kratzkopf@discuss.tchncs.de
          8·
          7 days ago

          I was convinced I had seen the spelling ‘disk’ before, so I looked it up and found this (new to me) and interesting distinction on wiktionary.

          In most varieties of English, disk is the preferred spelling for magnetic media (hence floppy disk, hard disk, disk drive), whereas disc is preferred for optical media (hence compact disc, digital versatile disc, optical disc). For all other uses, disk is preferred in American English and acceptable in Canadian English, and disc otherwise. Less commonly, disc is used for magnetic media (as in floppy disc and discette); similarly, disk is sometimes used for optical media, as in compact disk and optical disk.

          But also both forms seem to be usable for geometric disc shapes.

          • heartSagan5@lemmy.zip
            2·
            6 days ago

            It’s probably a replication on our languages.

            For example, in Swedish… it’s spelled telefon, not telephone. I was trying to think of a word, where in Swedish, it’s a k whereas in English, it’s a c. Ah, yes - katten for cat, as in felix.

            Did you know that laser, as in laser disc, is likely from the Swedish word läser, which means to read.

            • Bluescluestoothpaste@sh.itjust.works
              2·
              4 days ago

              LASER is actually an acronym “light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation”

              But i have no idea if there was any swedish influence on the people who came up with name

  • rmuk@feddit.ukEnglish
    7·
    6 days ago

    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 - and absurd - 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.

  • matlag@sh.itjust.works
    8·
    7 days ago

    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!

  • heartSagan5@lemmy.zip
    4·
    6 days ago

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

    Also, I’m sure the alphabet naming thing came from C/C++, which came after C, which borrowed from B, etc. And yes, there is a D, but people prefer scripting languages because reasons.

  • Mr_Dr_Oink@lemmy.world
    2·
    6 days ago

    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.

  • grainOfSalt@sh.itjust.works
    1·
    6 days ago

    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 by default for departments that still relied on them. Now they’re on NAS drives or SharePoint, which you can just access without mapping. I just pinned the ones I use in File Explorer so they’re there but not “mapped”.

    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 immediately 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. (https://support.novell.com/docs/Tids/Solutions/10027779.html) I remember in the 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.