
For what are the Windows A:\ and B:\ drives used? - fakelvis
http://superuser.com/questions/231273/for-what-are-the-windows-a-and-b-drives-used
======
RiderOfGiraffes
My first computer didn't have disk drives at all - it used standard audio
cassette tapes in standard audio cassette machines. I remember feeding the
audio into an oscilliscope and reverse engineering the format used on the
tape, then writing Z80 machine code (I didn't have an assember - I wrote
actual hex opcodes and fed them into a program I wrote that read hex and poked
the values into memory) to create tapes that then overwrote the stack and
booted me into a machine code monitor.

Then I wrote a Forth operating system.

This was on a 16KB machine (I had the expansion pack) with a 1.7MHz Z80.

Fun days. I still have the machine and its complete circuit diagram. I should
get it out again, but then again, I don't have time:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2095231>

~~~
cubicle67
A few years ago I went back to school for a bit. One day I was sitting with my
classmates, average age about 18, discussing our first computers. I mentioned
I got started on a Vic 20 with a tape drive. Suggested someone, "Was that so
you could listen to music while you coded?". Took some effort to convince them
I wasn't pulling their leg when I told them that it was used to save
programmes to

~~~
anon_for_this_1
Ahh the Vic 20. Warms my heart just hearing about it :) My parents bribed me
to do some stuff when I was younger with the reward of a floppy disk drive. I
was living like a boss when I got that drive!

~~~
cubicle67
Still got mine, and a box of cartridges. Hacked the paddles into an some
electronics experiment years ago, and the RF modulator's given up the ghost,
but other than that still all good. Even still got the book, minus the back
cover

~~~
drndown2007
Does that mean you still have a Commodore 64? (Seems like everyone upgraded --
I mean, 64 freaking K!!!). Course you only got to use 49K of it, but still!

------
raganwald
Floppies!? Kids these days. My High School had an actual, physical computer, a
Data General minicomputer. We used teletypes that printed on a continuous roll
of cheap paper.

The computer used removable media: 12" removable "Diablo" 5MB hard drive
platters. One had four user basic on it, one had single user basic, and one
was locked away with the software for grading students.

Memory management was primitive: BASIC ran in RAM, and if you used single user
basic, you had 4x the RAM and therefore room for 4x the program. When swapping
drives, you had to boot the computer by toggling the CPU's three instructions
into the front panel.

I wrote a massive Star Trek adventure game in single user basic. Friends would
actually creep into the lab overnight so they could play by themselves.

~~~
jdee
Luxury! I used to have to snip endless chads out of punched cards to represent
the very zeroes and ones of the program i was writing! Thanks to
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1a1wHxTyo>

~~~
Vivtek
You had cards? We had to use a hammer and awl to punch the holes into vellum
that we tanned ourselves.

~~~
hc5
I'll just leave this here :) <http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1992-09-08/>

~~~
ghostDancer
One more :) xkcd Real programmers :<http://xkcd.com/378/>

~~~
billswift
That is a rip-off of an even older User Friendly strip.

------
RyanMcGreal
> "Please Insert Disk 13" OH GOD WHERE IS DISK 13, I CAN'T FIND DISK 13. -
> Jeff 16 hours ago

I have exactly this memory as well.

My first computer was a Compaq Deskpro Portable. It had a 5.25" floppy drive
and a 40 MB hard disk. It was an embarrassment of riches - how could you ever
fill up 40 whole _mega_ bytes? Between that and my custom AUTOEXEC.BAT file, I
was set.

As it happens, I still have most of the files I created on that original
computer, and can even run my old BASIC programs using DOSBox on Ubuntu. I had
to copy the files via 5.25" floppies to another computer that had a 5.25" and
a 3.5" floppy drive; and from there on 3.5" floppies to yet another computer
that had a 3.5" floppy drive and a CD drive.

~~~
dctoedt
A couple of months ago, my siblings and I were cleaning out our parents'
house. In the attic, I came across my original Compaq sewing-machine luggable.
I'd given it to my dad when I upgraded to something newer. If memory serves,
the Compaq came with two 5.25" floppy drives and 256K RAM. When I was using it
myself, I upgraded to 640K RAM, swapped the B: drive for a _10_ -MB hard disk,
and eventually swapped the A: drive for a 3.5" drive. I thought I was pretty
cutting-edge (for a non-techie, that is).

I hauled the luggable down from the attic and plugged it in. The only things
that worked were the fan and the power indicator light. I guess 25-plus years
of San Antonio summers weren't exactly the best thing for the electronics. Off
to Goodwill it went.

~~~
RyanMcGreal
Last time I fired mine up (a couple of years ago), it still booted. However,
an alarming amount of smoke came out of the fan vent so I didn't keep it
running for long.

~~~
calloc
Science compels you!

------
giu
This question makes me feel old. And I'm in my early twenties.

~~~
NickPollard
One of my friends who teaches 11-16 year-olds recently had to explain to one
of her classes what camera film was, and how it was used.

~~~
motters
The movement from camera film to digital cameras was a largely unnoticed
revolution which took place within the last decade.

~~~
patrickyeon
In industry, that may be so (I seem to recall one of the Star Wars prequels
being the first feature movie done entirely with digital cameras). For end-
user video cameras (handicams, or whatnot), we've been storing to magnetic
tape for a good bit longer though.

~~~
CrLf
Being digital doesn't mean using solid state storage. Magnetic tape is
probably still the most used medium for digital video cameras. For example,
Betacam SX is still used.

------
benwerd
Aw, man. I turned 32 on Friday, which is 224 in developer years, and have
spent the last couple of days consoling myself that everything's fine, I'm not
past it, etc etc. And now this. Thank you, Hacker News. Thank you so much. I
am as old as dust and time and the fabric of the universe. Now I know how all
those COBOL programmers felt.

~~~
redthrowaway
Obligatory:

[http://thejokeshop.org/2008/12/as-useful-as-a-cobol-
programm...](http://thejokeshop.org/2008/12/as-useful-as-a-cobol-programmer/)

~~~
tel
* It was actually eight thousand years later, not the year 2000. Technology had advanced to such a degree that everyone had virtual reality interfaces which allowed them to contact anyone else on the planet.*

This joke needs to be adjusted for the times. It should say 10 years not 8000.

------
Unosolo
Few people on superuser.com seem to mention that B:\ was always reserved even
on a single floppy system so that it was possible to copy data from one floppy
onto another:

1\. Insert source disk

2\. Type copy a:\ _._ b:\

3\. The system will read a chunk of data from a:\ then say: Please insert disk
B: and press any key to continue...

4\. You'd swap the disks, press a key, and the system will write the chunk of
data and say Please insert disk A: and press any key to continue...

This would go on and on and on...

Anyone remembers installing Win95 and the number of 1.44MB 3.5" floppies it
came on? 26! And once you got to about disk no. 13 it would start asking you
to insert seemingly random disk numbers every minute or so... Or how about
getting to disk number 17 and being told that the installation is corrupt,
start over.... errrr.......

~~~
TimJYoung
Re; Win95 - Yes, and I still have them somewhere in my attic. I even have the
original Windows 95 beta floppies. :-)

Another one that was a doozie was VC++ for Windows 3.1 - it was about 13 or 14
3.5" floppies also.

------
erikstarck
Quite fascinating how some design decisions tend to stick due to technical or
other reasons. We will probably still run Windows 2020 on the C-drive.
Sometimes the reason is backwards compatiblity, other times it's something
that requires a huge redesign of an entire system.

But, most of the time I think it's because people simply think that this is
the way things are supposed to be. One example is how long it took before
Auto-ISO became an option on DSLRs.

In all cases there are opportunities for a startup to be disruptive. So, keep
looking for those C-drives!

~~~
jedsmith
A massive pile of legacy Windows stuff probably assumes C: is the boot volume.

Windows has always had extensive backward compatibility, even if it requires
tweaking to run 9x programs on XP and up. I often wonder how much better
Windows could be if Microsoft were to choose to repeat OS X's innovation,
which was almost completely severing backward compatibility.

~~~
brudgers
> _"A massive pile of legacy Windows stuff probably assumes C: is the boot
> volume._ "

Seeing as Windows has been bootable from removable drives and over networks
for a long time, I sincerely doubt it.

~~~
roel_v
When you read it as 'a massive pile of legacy Windows applications', which is
reasonable, it's not a stretch to assume that many applications written in the
last 20 years assume that the OS is on a harddisk, and on C: for that matter.

~~~
brudgers
Prior to Windows 95 the preponderance of Windows programs were 16bit. Seeing
as 16bit programs are not compatible with recent versions of Windows one can
be reasonably assured that they are not in that vast pool of legacy
applications.

Hand in hand with 32bit Windows came the registry, which is where most
applications stored configuration information until relatively recent times.

To the best of my recollection, I have not seen an application or utility hard
coded to C: since Windows 95. But I would be interested to learn of the actual
examples which support your assumptions.

~~~
sesqu
I haven't used windows since 98SE, but I learned my lesson and have
recommended all family members put programs in the default locations.

I used to have Windows on C:, Program Files on D: and My Documents on E:.
Everything broke, to an approximation.

------
redthrowaway
Who else remembers using the square punch to put a hole in those 3 1/2" AOL
disks to reformat them as HD?

~~~
ja27
Remember punching single-sided 5 1/4" disks to make them double-sided?

~~~
camiller
Did that all the time for the Apple //e disks. Since most of the media at the
time was for 360K disks for IBM compatibles but since the Apple format was
143K the vast majority of the time it worked.

In fact if I dug around in the box under my desk I could probably find the
special puncher, and a couple unused ribbons for the old daisy wheel printer,
etc.

------
iwwr
I remember a time when you needed to carry 30 floppies to be able to copy
C&C:Red Alert... and it was worth it.

~~~
electromagnetic
I just used the CD trick when playing multiplayer. You start the game with the
disc in one computer and then eject and run into the next room to start the
game on that computer.

I think 9/10ths of the games I played with my brother were exploited with this
trick until the warez scenes started developing proper and timely released
nocd cracks.

~~~
LordLandon
Why? Westwood were probably the only game company that understood this
problem, and shipped their games on two CDs (allies and soviets), even if the
content was mostly identical, and could all easily fit on one, just so that
two people could play at once.

~~~
electromagnetic
It wasn't a particular problem with Westwood games, although it was when we
got another player involved. I was thinking more of Age of Empires when
actually saying that, I remember getting a 3-way going using a single disc.

We managed a 7-player at school, but that was using 2 discs.

------
Steve0
Makes you wonder, when will the floppy be discarded as the icon for 'save'?

~~~
wardrox
Maybe when something comes along to replace "save"?

With the steadily increasing amount of software that auto-saves without you
noticing, maybe soon we just wont need to "save" anything. It'll just happen.

------
jaywalker
Best comment: I never anticipated this day would ever come....

------
michael_dorfman
I recently bought my 13-year-old daughter a laptop with 8 gig of RAM. When I
was 13, I was lucky enough to get a computer with 8 kb of RAM (and one of the
8 went to the operating system, so there were 7167 bytes free.)

There aren't too many areas where one generation translates to a million-fold
improvement.

~~~
madaxe
Your daughter had better be using that 8 gig for something useful. 8k should
be enough for anybody!

~~~
michael_dorfman
Every now and then I regale her (and her sisters) with tales about life in the
olden days, when if you wanted to change the channel on the TV, you had to
_get up and walk across the frickin' room!_

Now excuse me, I need to chase some pesky kids off my lawn.

~~~
nhebb
In college our remote broke. I taped a dime to the end of a fishing pole so it
had a nice flat surface to push the channel up/down buttons. Channel fishing
FTW!

------
snorkel
Don't even get us old timers started on how we used to mount CD drives.
Editing AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS and making sure the sound card driver
loaded _after_ so it wouldn't steal the same interrupt, and sometimes D:\
would appear to be there but you couldn't read it ... ah, my back hurts! Get
off my lawn!

~~~
dfox
An writing another batchfile as to load MSCDEX only when you actually need to
access CDROM as to preserve these precious 50kB of conventional memory :)

------
haberman
When I was learning DOS on my dad's computer at work (IBM XT), I knew how to
use the "cd" command to change into a directory. Unfortunately I didn't know
how to get back out of a directory ("cd \") so I would restart the computer
whenever I needed to get back to the root directory.

Ah, those were the days.

~~~
wizardishungry
I believe that I used to change drive letters to get around this but it may
have eventually remembered the last directory when you changed back.

------
maxklein
In 20 years people won't understand CDs either, or why people would carry
around plastic as big as 3 iPods to play 12 songs.

~~~
redthrowaway
In 20 years, people won't understand iPods, or why you would have to
physically carry around data anyway.

~~~
maxklein
How would they play music when jogging or in the train then?

~~~
redthrowaway
I don't think it's unreasonable to expect ubiquitous wireless connectivity of
one kind or another, and cloud storage. As for what form the device might
take, who knows? It would have been pretty hard to predict smartphones in
1990; I expect further consolidation of devices, but have no idea what they'll
look like.

~~~
whatusername
Do you live in a major US city or Small European or Asian Country?

Look at remote places in Canada or Australia.

Local data caching is important.

~~~
redthrowaway
I'd agree that caching is important, but when, realistically, would you not
have any sort of wireless access in 20 years? Driving? Many cars these days
have hard drives; it's easy to see that becoming more prevalent as storage
gets even cheaper. The people designing mobile devices aren't worried about a
single farmer in the middle of Saskatchewan. Cell phone providers didn't even
bother with the _whole_ of Saskatchewan for a number of years.

If you can get a cell signal, you can get streaming media, or at least you
will be able to. I don't see that being much of a problem.

------
motters
As far as I remember the A and B drives were used for floppy disks. In the
olden days home computers didn't have hard drives, and typically either had a
single or dual floppy drive. With a dual drive you could do fancy things like
make backup copies, without having to repeatedly store data to RAM and swap
source and destination floppies. In the 1980s home computers typically didn't
have enough memory to store the entire contents of a floppy disk in RAM, which
made the process of creating backups irksome if you didn't have a dual drive.

If you've only started using Windows based computers within the last five
years then the missing A and B drives may seem mysterious. Floppy drives
started disappearing from first laptops and then desktop machines in the early
2000s.

~~~
cmiles74
I was working at an Apple reseller when the iMac came out. Part of our sales
pitch was to try to convince everyone who bought an iMac that they needed a
USB floppy drive to go with it. Everyone was convinced that people needed that
floppy drive.

[http://www.osnews.com/story/18/The_iMac_and_the_Floppy_Drive...](http://www.osnews.com/story/18/The_iMac_and_the_Floppy_Drive_A_Conspiracy_Theory)

------
bhavin
One might wonder why the first two letters are for floppy and not HDD. If you
follow the drive letters, going from A to higher alphabets _generally_ give
you evolution of technology (ignoring network map Z:).

A: - floppy C:/D: - HDD E: - CD/DVD F: - External Storage

~~~
pwg
Because MsDos, at least in its early versions, could not dynamically assign
new drive letters to newly inserted disks. So the workaround, which is still
with us years later in Windows 7, was to reserve at boot time the first two
letters (A/B) for drives with removable media (i.e., floppy drives, there were
no usb flash dongles in those days).

~~~
Qz
I don't think that's true for Vista or Windows 7. I have B:\ as a Backup
partition from my second HD on both.

~~~
ramchip
Does your computer have a floppy drive?

------
bane
"Once upon a time ... technologies of the past." "Il était une fois... les
technologies du passé."

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdSHeKfZG7c>

This video made me feel tremendously old.

------
bnastic
SSD is the best upgrade we can do these days?

Kids don't know what it feels to upgrade from a C-64 with a "datasette" to an
early Atari 520ST with 3.5" floppies. THAT was an upgrade, everything else
pales in comparison.

------
othello
This reminds me that even us twenty-somethings may one day be made every bit
as clumsy and baffled by whatever comes up 30 years from now as our own
proverbial mothers are today...

~~~
julian37
Like this, linked from the article: <http://www.penny-
arcade.com/comic/2005/12/12/>

------
jeza
> "I think it shows how obsolete these things have become that the 'new
> generation' have no experience of them :-) Makes me feel old – Andy Paton"

Yet we had to put up with this inferior technology for so long. I remember
people were still running around with floppy disks at high school in the late
90s/early 00s (it was easily 20 year old technology by that time) and I
started using the internet for transferring my files. So much that I have
never purchased a USB memory device.

------
EGreg
They used to be used for floppy disks and other such things! In fact they
started in DOS. Ah, remember the days? I do... b because I'm 27.

Anyone here started programming with QBasic?

~~~
nollidge
I ate QBasic for breakfast for a couple years. Rewrote SNAKE.BAS with SCREEN
13 graphics. Wrote a slot machine program based on the one in "Absolute
Beginner's Guide to QBasic" (IIRC - Google is no help, but I remember it had a
neon green cover with a safari adventure guy). Rewrote a loan amortization
program that my dad had originally written in Wang BASIC (and even then he
only had a printout).

I have a soft spot in my heart for QBasic. As DOS-based procedural languages
go, it has of the best editing environments, fantastic integrated help, and
hits that sweet spot of making simple things easy and hard things possible
that never outgrew my learning curve. Contrary to popular opinion, I never had
to "unlearn" anything once I graduated to modern languages.

------
edw519
The possibilities are endless (27 second video)...

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3O3HdjOfsI>

------
ck2
I finally threw away my Model II 8-inch floppies a few years ago.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Okona-GfhR-TRS-80.jpg>

One day you'll have to take your kids to a museum to show them a CRT monitor
(and they will have to take their kids to a museum to show them an
incandescent light bulb).

------
lesterbuck
Where did floppy disks come from, Daddy?

I'm old enough to remember the 8" floppy disk that was invented by IBM to ...
wait for it ... boot System 360! I think they had CE (customer engineer, i.e.,
repair guy) diagnostics, firmware, etc. on them, as the little bit I actually
saw one being used, it was during maintenance.

------
didip
Back in the floppy days, archive tools matter because it can cut down the
number of disks.

Cannot believe I still remember my old favorite:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARJ>

Screw pkzip. It always asked me to insert the first disk, again, last.

------
nevvermind
There are too many "this makes me feel old" in here. And in SO, for that
matter. You snob folks...

~~~
Maro
Why does that make us snobs?

~~~
rogerclark
because for this purpose, you are all using "old" for "more knowledgeable and
superior"

------
tintin
Also a nice reminder to expect the unexpected in your work. I bet most
programs back then trusted there was a disk in A. Now installers are relying
on the existence of C. But what if you boot from USB? The '/' solution is a
more elegant one in this case.

------
forinti
I must be a ancient, because I remember having to identify which side of the
floppy I wanted to use!

On the BBC Micro, the first drive had sides 0 and 2; the second drive had
sides 1 and 3. And I was lucky to have two drives. I only saw HDs on
magazines.

~~~
jeffmould
How about having to notch the other side of a single sided floppy to make it
double sided. Or even having to put tape over a notch to make it read-only. I
remember those little black pieces of tape that came with a box of floppies to
make the read-only.

------
lovskogen
How long before a question like "My DVD wont play in this old computers DVD
player?"?

------
radioactive21
You know what actually amazes me these days. I once had to explain this exact
same question to someone and they were very interested in the answer.

I remember back in the old days when I would bring up anything tech I got
called a nerd and/or geek and it was the kind stuff you dont talk to normal
people about.

I got made fun of by people for talking about IRC channels and being on
internet boards, back when they were command line.

The weirdest change for me as been the acceptance of knowing about technology.
Today if you dont know what the interent or a computer is you are consider old
and out of date. Back then if you knew that stuff you were an outcast.

------
pronik
What scares me about this question is that such easy and popular questions
(and answers to them) mean a lot of karma points to all of the participants
before it goes into community wiki mode, while folks who actually can google
their problems (and spend time actually working instead of reloading
StackOverflow every five seconds) have low scores, since the questions they
ask are complicated and thus rarely answered and even more rarely popular.

------
runjake
The Timex-Sinclair 1000 was like my 3rd or 4th computer. End of contest
(hopefully all the real PDP folks are long dead, right?).

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Sinclair_1000>

2K RAM, 3 MHZ CPU (much faster than the .9 MHZ of my TRS-80 Color Computer.
Yes, it didn't even have 1 MHZ). And yes, I did a lot of programming on that
keyboard.

~~~
cadr
A VAX 11/750 was my 4th or so computer.

Of course, that was after an Apple II clone, and C64, and a 286. They were
scrapping it and I (my high school, but really me) ended up with it. Can't
remember if I ever got it working properly, but it was really impressive. It
had been used in an NMR setup and had really neat vacuum tubes to do connect
to that.

~~~
runjake
Scrapped doesn't count, if so I have some 1960s gear. I also have a bit of
nostalgic fondness for VAX & VMS as I spent my early computing career working
on it (along with the full range of DEC gear). I'd never want to go back,
though.

------
rman666
My first personal computer was an Ohio Scientific C24P. I had to load BASIC
into RAM using a 300 baud cassette tape. Beat that, ya youngsters!

------
wallflower
Also, not everyone was cool enough to have both A: and B:

And tape drives transfer speeds were 300? baud. Most people can read way
faster and some can type faster.

I have many memories of working late in school labs, feeling that awful
feeling when the sky outside gets light as it literally dawns on you you've
been there all night, making backups on multiple floppy disks as you
go...Bathed in the fluorescents

------
lostbit
I still have my MSX Hotbit with a 5 1/4 floppy disk extension. I had a lot fun
with it in the past. Now I'm wondering what to do with it... At this time, I
guess kids will find interesting that a computer must be attached to the TV so
you can have a screen. Some love the typewriter, which prints at the same time
you type!

------
marckremers
The fact that Windows still keeps this hierarchy is what stuns me the most.
Why are they still silently referring to this technology in 2011?! It just
boggles my mind. It's almost like keeping your floppy disks in your top drawer
even though you haven't used them for 15 years. And won't. Ever.

------
maguay
I'm in my early twenties, and one of my earliest memories of computers was my
Dad trying to get a book of stamps out of the floppy drive on his Amiga. Plus,
who could forget installing Windows 95 from, what was it, 20 floppies? And now
we buy 1Tb drives like it's nothing...

------
rogerclark
This guy obviously wrote this question to provoke this exact response from
people. He's duped all of you into obsessing over nostalgia and
thinking/saying you've got a leg up on "today's youngsters."

Nobody who asks this question would need to go to a StackOverflow site to get
it answered.

------
jadedoto
I miss going to class with a floppy and knowing it was corrupted, get an
extension on the assignment. I am only 20... are there really computer users
out there unfamiliar with floppies? I keep 5.25" drives around for fun and I
still have Windows 95 on 3.25"ers :)

------
skbohra123
Never, this would happen again that one technology/company would have such
huge effect.

------
el_chapitan
This makes me remember when the first iMac came out (apparently in '98) and
just broke my brain by not having a floppy drive.

<http://www.businessweek.com/1998/36/b3594050.htm>

------
codeup
Knowing the answer and feeling somewhat nostalgic about it makes me feel old!

~~~
mootothemax
_and feeling somewhat nostalgic about it_

And then remembering taking forever to save anything on a school computer,
only for the floppy to read half the file and die when I got home. It's
amazing - maybe it was the crappy quality of floppies I was using, or maybe I
was using them for too long, but for me, regularly not being able to read data
back off a floppy was a fact of life. Times have definitely changed for the
better :)

~~~
danielh
Norton Disk Doctor to the rescue! Even if it couldn't save the data, you could
reuse the floppy. They were expensive at the time.

Out of curiosity, I just googled for prices and it seems prices stayed about
the same since I bought the last pack.

~~~
mootothemax
_Norton Disk Doctor to the rescue! Even if it couldn't save the data, you
could reuse the floppy._

Not only reuse but be pleasantly surprised yet irritated at the same time
because suddenly the disk was magically usable again!

------
Maro
I'm turning 30 in April and sometimes I feel like an old dog. Nevertheless,
the article made my day, I can't stop laughing over it and the comments, esp.
the Penny Arcade link in this thread. Cheers =)

------
nhebb
I just realized that I have a bunch of old 3.5" discs in my desk - even though
I don't have a single system with a floppy drive anymore. I just cleared out a
bunch of space in my hutch. Thanks HN!

------
flexd
This makes me remember elementary school and saving stuff on floppies, and
that i have Sango fighter on floppies in a drawer somewhere. They really do
not make games as good as they were before!

~~~
JacobAldridge
The past ain't what it used to be.

------
antidaily
Jeff Atwood tweeted this yesterday with the comment "want to feel old?"

------
retube
I remember having an Amstrad 640k. Two 5 1/4 floppy drives, no hard disk.
Booting it up involved putting in about 5 disks one after the other and took
about 20 minutes.

Ah those were the days.

~~~
rbanffy
5 disks? What were you running?

------
isomorph
In the style of one of those YouTube comments, "I'm 19 and I have used a
floppy disk!!"

------
jakemcgraw
When I installed Windows 95, it was off of 14 floppy disks, feels good man.

------
radioactive21
Good times, I used to install windows 95 with 20 floppy disks!!!

------
jaspero
3.5" HD Floppies were awesome compared to non-HD.

------
beej71
It's the same reason there's no Channel 1 on TV.

------
elevenE
I'm in my late teens. Makes me feel old too :)

------
makeramen
NUMBER MUNCHERS! i miss that game

------
sbt
Now I just feel old

------
run4yourlives
I feel so old.

------
rick_2047
Interesting. After the first few thoughts like "This can't be happening I am
only 19" and "this guy is either dumb or 6" my next thought was "What would be
the question that would make me feel really old when I am in my 50s"?

The effect this question has on people is because they remember some
information which most of the users today don't know as they have never used
that technology. So what technology of today will become so obsolete that you
would remember your age?

------
mkramlich
That's one of those questions that makes a guy feel old. I also remember 8"
floppy disks first-hand. I was a kid, but still.

------
hackermom
This gave me a good laughter, and I'm only 30.

