What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for? | Hacker News Reader

What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for?

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22 pointswhy-el23 comments

You know you're getting old when you are shocked that someone asks what A: and B: are for, having never seen nor conceptualized that they were once floppy drive letters.

I'm 22 and remember floppy disks...

Seriously!

I remember buying my first box of ten 3.5" floppies, which stored 1.44MB of data EACH, after years of using the older 360KB 5.25" disks, and marveling how much storage I was carrying in that little box...

Kids today, with their USB sticks and DVD drives and Internets. Grumble grumble. Get off my lawn!

There's the 720kb 3.5" floppies too. I remember there was a shady outfit(s) that sold punchers you could use on these disks to trick the drive into thinking it was a 1.44mb disk.

Of course, those 720kb disks were never intended to store 1.44mb of data, so while you could write that data to the disk, and maybe even read it immediately after, the odds that you could read it again awhile later were pretty low.

My exact thought. Man I feel old. I installed Windows 3.1 from floppy disks...

Duplicates:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2095628

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2998973

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3775943

My own link is a duplicate? :)

Yes. And that link is also a duplicate. See [1] for more information.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=recursion

I used floppy disks up until I was around 8-10 years old. Around then my transition away from floppies into cds was pretty much at the point that I never used them again. I occasionally used floppies in primary school but not very often. I only ever used 3.5' however.

I'm 20 now and I didn't remember that floppies were A: and B: so went into the article expecting some interesting explanation and then face-palmed when I realised.

If you'd asked me what A: and B: where I wouldn't have been able to tell you and I used floppies. I feel young...

I saw some floppies for sale in wh smith the other day. I might buy a set.

I used tapes until I was around 12 years old. Around then my transition away from tapes into floppies was pretty much at the point I never used them again (except for music, until CDs took over).

What I want to know is how long MS will keep using drive letters with Windows. Drive letters and backslashes for path separators are relics of a bygone age.

Questions I've received from the newer guys getting into IT.

"Why did people have computers with no internet? What did you do with it?"

"What is a BBS?"

"How did you know what to type at a command line?"

> "How did you know what to type at a command line?"

My son asks me this all the time. What he doesn't know is the amount of time I spent going over the contents of DOS's built-in help.

"Why did people have computers with no internet? What did you do with it?"

I think about that, now and again. Mostly when I find myself with a laptop and no wireless or paired phone. IIRC ..

Played Civilization. Played Sim City. CompuServe. Work.

I miss the 3.5" disks - those things had a really appealing appearance. The hard(ish) case and the sliding door gave them this sense that they would keep your data safe forever. Of course, I was just an impressionable kid, but whoever the designer was for those things - you left me with a lasting impression.

Feels strange to realize that there are Windows/PC-using people out there that may have never dealt with a machine that has a floppy drive. Doesn't seem that long ago that they were a standard component. I can still remember Dell releasing their first system that didn't include one.

Change happens. When I got my first real job in IT, one of our tasks was moving data from 8-inch to 5-inch floppy.

I hasten to add this was not - for the junior guys - real hard. Walk by the machine every so often, switch out the disks, hit [return], come back in a few hours.

Makes me wonder how long the "Save" button will stay as a floppy disk.

In the operating system I'm running, there's no "Save" any more..

chrome os?

My A: is my physical Blu-Ray burner, and my B: is a virtual drive.

http://i.imgur.com/rGp12.png

Yeah, thought this was some kind of joke question, and I'm only 29 ;)

I used 360k 5.25 floppies when I was a kid...

Is this post a bad omen for Hacker News? In my experience HN has been a safe haven for higher-level tech posts, news, and information; this seems very elementary.

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