
What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for? - kamaal
http://superuser.com/questions/231273/what-are-the-windows-a-and-b-drives-used-for/231278
======
rayiner
It's funny to talk about the 20 year old hackers who didn't ever have the
experience of installing Word Perfect 5.x from 30-40 floppies, but let me tell
you that those kids are going to feel just as old pretty soon. My daughter,
who is about to turn one, is puzzled by why my Macbook Air doesn't do anything
when she touches the screen. She doesn't recognize my dad's old Treo, which he
gave her as a toy, as a phone, but will put a thin slab block up to her ear.
We don't have cable at home, so she watches all her shows on Netflix and
iTunes.

~~~
judk
Sad that a 1 year old has "all her shows" to watch.

~~~
dwaltrip
[Non-valuable contribution, removed]

Edit: I apologize for the rudeness of my comment. However, it is my
understanding that the evidence available today points to things like TV being
damaging to the development of the very young (1-3 years old)

~~~
rayiner
Do you even have kids?

------
Jugurtha
Awww, that is an adorable question :)

I think in DefCon 18, Gordon "Fyodor" Lyon was talking about using Lua in
Nmap. He said that the description mentioned that all of it and the doc could
fit in a floppy disk.. And then he said "For the younger audience, a floppy
disk is.." at which point the audience exploded in laughter.

I'm 26 now, but my oldest brother is 18 years older than me and almost all of
us in the family are engineers so I had different technologies around the
house. (Not old enough to see "drum memory", though).

------
raldi
Also, even if you only had one physical floppy drive, it would still respond
to A: and B:, albeit as split personalities. What I mean is that you could
stick your programs disk in there and type A:EDITOR.EXE to run some editing
program, and then go to save your document and type B:MYDOC.TXT as the
filename, and DOS would know that you wanted to write this file to a different
floppy, so it would day, "Insert disk for drive B and press enter", prompting
you to swap the floppies. Then, when the editor program needed to access some
of its files again, it would try to access, say, A:LIBRARY.OVL, and DOS would
know that meant it was time to prompt the user to swap disks again.

~~~
danellis
At that time (okay, a little later, but there was some overlap), I was using
RISC OS. Its disk format allowed for each disk to have a name, which would be
used in fully qualified filenames (e.g. ADFS::MyData.$.Docs.Resume). The OS
could then ask for the disk by name (MyData).

------
Stratoscope
When I got my first IBM PC in early 1982, IBM only offered single sided single
density floppy drives with 160KB each.

But double sided drives were already available on the market. The only problem
was that the PC BIOS and DOS didn't support the second side.

So I bought a PC with no floppy drives and picked up a couple of double sided
drives at a local distributor for $300 each.

As I'd hoped, they worked fine as single sided drives too, so I was able to
boot DOS. Then I got to work on supporting the other side.

It seemed a bit complicated to try to merge the two sides into a single FAT
filesystem, so I wrote a TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident program) that mapped
the other two sides onto additional drive letters.

That turned out to be surprisingly easy. So the four sides on my two floppy
drives were A:, B:, C:, and D: drives.

Later I got an awesome Tallgrass 10MB hard drive for only $5000, and that
became my E: drive.

Now I knew my storage problems were over: I would never run out of space with
that thing!

------
DanielBMarkham
I now officially christen this the "old guy thread of the day".

Back in my day, kid, we didn't have no stinking floppies for our PCs. All we
had was cassette recorders, and we were happy to have 'em!

Reading this question took me down memory lane to doing a lot of PR#6.
Couldn't remember if that command was for floppies or cassettes. Had to look
it up. It was how we did I/O on the Apple II. As I remember, you changed the
number (PR#3, PR#4, etc) based on the _physical slot_ the peripheral was
plugged into. This was back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and real men wore
skirts.

~~~
CurtHagenlocher
If I remember correctly, "PR#6" was basically just a command that executed the
code at $c600. Each peripheral card had a 256-byte address space which was
mapped into $cx00 where x was the slot number. Slot 6 was the standard slot
for the disk controller -- it may even have been wired in, in later machines.
So "PR#6" basically executed the firmware boot loader for the floppy drive.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
What I found weird was that I remembered the command, but not the technology
it came from or exactly how I used it. So I'm Googling around trying to figure
out when and why it was important. For some reason I remembered it as "Print
#6".

Old age and forgetfulness is going to be really strange for a whole generation
of computer nerds. So many different technologies, commands, and paradigms all
jumbled up.

------
SeanDav
A friend of my Father's was a mainframe guru, back in the day, and he told us
about "cylinder" hard drives that would take several hours to power down
because the torsional stress on them would get too high if slowed down too
quickly. Also tape drives that were spinning so quickly they could be
dangerous.

Sounds almost like heavy engineering!

~~~
adestefan
I remember the time someone thought they'd save money by buying cheap paper
for the high speed IBM 6400 line printer. The print head moved so fast it just
shredded the paper into a fine dust that caked in every internal part. It
sucked cleaning that out.

------
iamben
We're not very far away from "what is the blue 'Save' icon meant to be?" are
we?

Kind of amazing really. Girlfriend's nephews are 6 and 9, pretty tech savvy
(there's a lot in the house), but they had no idea what the slots in the front
of their grandfather's computer were (and why should they?!).

~~~
adamlj
The way things are going we will probably not have any Save buttons at all
soon.

~~~
bentcorner
Maybe for certain applications we're used to saving in, but unless there are
revolutionary changes in computing I'm betting that you'll be able to save in
notepad for a long time coming.

------
return0
OMG, i'm getting too old.

~~~
etfb
I came here to say that. In fact, bugger it, I don't care about originality!
I'm going to say it too!

Oh gods, I'm so old.

~~~
IgorPartola
I am only 27! Why is this happening?!

~~~
dpratt
Just wait - in another two or three years, you will suddenly not be able to be
trusted with meaningful architectural decisions, you will be looked down upon
as too slow, and your years of knowledge will be ignored because clearly you
don't have anything to offer.

------
mililani
Man, this question makes me feel old as hell--I'm 40, btw. It reminds me of
the time when my friend's daughter asked what the car window handle was for. I
was like, it rolls the windows up and down. She thought it was a new thing.
Wow.

------
ceautery
That's pretty fun. I'm glad the highest voted reply on superuser wasn't snarky
about the answer. This sort of reminds me of the "Who the hell is Paul
McCartney?" thing on Twitter recently... which is an order of magnitude more
irritating than a kid who never saw a floppy drive.

------
networked
The drive letter B: is also used by BartPE [1] as the default for its RAM
disk. In fact, I think every time but one I encountered a Windows-era PC that
had a B: drive it was a RAM disk, not a floppy drive.

[1] A bootable live Windows XP/Server 2003 environment. See
[http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/](http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/).

~~~
mtrimpe
A: and B: were more relevant when PCs didn't have hard drives. Back then
usually the OS would be on A and your current game/app would be on B.

I still remember the first game that was soooo big it required both A _and_ B,
meaning you to take the OS boot disk out (which you of course always forgot to
put back in after you were done.)

Good thing I had a dad who soldered Philips' Apple ][ clone together when I
was 2 so that I don't feel _that_ old for knowing this ;)

------
kabdib
My first mass storage was a PhiDeck, a tape cassette drive that stored data
digitally and that had motors to load and unload the heads and seek. It had a
file system, of sorts, that fit in about 6K of RAM. Effective data rate was
about 9600 bits/second, and it usually took 20-30 seconds to launch a program.

Primitive and slow as it was, it was still a vast improvement over audio
cassettes.

Later, I wrote a software UART and interfaced my Z-80 system to a single Atari
810 disk drive. 96K of storage and tons faster. I got a lot of work done on
that system.

~~~
lttlrck
One of my favorites memories is my dad trying to copy a BBC Model B compact
audio cassette _without a cable_ ... speaker to microphone! He started it and
crept out the room quietly closing the door behind him. It did not work.

~~~
smartaleckkill
I recall recording software onto audio tape from radio broadcasts, I think it
was a regular BBC radio show. (If anyone remembers I'd love a reminder of the
details.)

------
IgorPartola
In 2008 I got to play with an old oscilloscope/i486 hybrid beast with dual
5.25 inch floppy drives still in use at my physics lab. You could save the
measurements to B while running the code off A. AFAIK it is still in use.

------
iv_08
For the rugrats among us: [http://imgur.com/bOdxEUW](http://imgur.com/bOdxEUW)

------
csense
When I bought a new computer in 2002, I specifically got one which still had a
floppy drive, because I wanted to be sure I could play all my DOS games via
boot disk [1].

DOSBox [2] was still in its infancy then, and the DOS emulation in Windows
was...less than one hundred percent compatible with all the hardware tricks
various DOS games used to squeeze the last ounce of performance out of the
hardware. (In the DOS days, it was common practice for application programs,
especially games, to directly deal with I/O ports, interrupts, DMA, etc.)

[1] A DOS boot disk is similar to a bootable Linux CD / DVD -- removable media
containing an OS. In this case, you mainly use it to customize the loaded
drivers on a per-game basis. Regardless of how much physical memory you have,
in DOS only 640K is conveniently addressable [3], so it's very important to
selectively load _only_ the drivers a specific game needs.

[2]
[http://www.classicdosgames.com/interviews/peterveenstra.html](http://www.classicdosgames.com/interviews/peterveenstra.html)

[3]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conventional_memory](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conventional_memory)

------
lobo_tuerto
Floppy DUO Imperial March:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHJOz_y9rZE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHJOz_y9rZE)

~~~
DiabloD3
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enZ4P7Azxys](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enZ4P7Azxys)

Doctor Who on 8 floppies

------
afandian
I found this really sad. I don't consider myself old, but I suppose I'm going
to have to start at some point. Maybe this is it.

------
thinkersilver
I remember laughing at my instructor when he mentioned carrying a box of punch
cards. Boy do I feel like the old timer now.

~~~
colomon
I spent a good bit of the summer of '89 writing C code to drive a tape punch
for programming CNC machines.

------
anilmujagic
I remember zipping the game on cca. 30 floppies at friend's place, then going
home and trying to unzip. Of course 27th or so would be corrupted. Sometimes
it took me 3-4 round trips to friend's place and back, to get the game
transferred :)

BTW, does anyone remember having to enter no. of cylinders in BIOS to make the
HDD work :)

------
thearn4
It's funny to think that only exposure folks have to floppy disks now is the
look of "save" icons.

------
adestefan
I had to go digging for a 3.5" drive a couple months back because I found some
floppies that had some college papers on them. I have a zip disk with some
artwork, too. At one point I had a SCSI zip drive and an Adaptec controller
for it, but I have no idea where they're at now.

~~~
powertower
Adaptec 2940 FTW!

------
carloc
Senility poll: Did you know the answer to this question?

~~~
tinco
You do realize that other people can't see your poll result right?

~~~
StavrosK
No

~~~
carloc
Nope. 7 yes so far!

------
mratzloff
My first computer was an Atari 800. It had a cassette deck and a 5 1/4" disk
drive. I spent a lot of my youth typing in BASIC games that were printed in
magazines and books, then modifying them to learn how it worked. My first
programming language...

When my parents brought home an IBM-compatible PC with an enormous _50 MB_
hard drive I could hardly believe my luck.

Anyway, I don't need this to feel old; my wife already does that. She was in
middle school when I was in college, and asks things like, "What's Galaga?"
But I suspect she does it on purpose about half the time now...

------
D9u
My first PC didn't have a C: drive.

It had two 5.25" diskettes to load the systems.

~~~
gutsy
Yup, me too. Put the DOS disk in start up the computer, then switch disks as
you needed to to run programs. That was so fun!

------
japhyr
My dad worked for DEC in the 70's and 80's. When I was young he took us in and
showed us a cabinet that had a bunch of spinning platters in it. They looked
like 12" record albums, but they were light brown and made of metal. At least
that's how I remember it, and I imagine they were the precursors to today's
spinning hard disks.

My dad let my brother and I take a couple retired disks home. We tried to play
frisbee once or twice with them, and then wisely decided that was probably a
bad idea.

------
bane
My first computer came with no drives, the tape drive was an optional
accessory. Loading programs from tape instead of typing them into the basic
was loads better. When I got my first PC I had a 3.5" (on B) and a 5.25" (on
A) and a bunch of my friends kept coming over to have me copy their 5.25"
disks to 3.5" disks and I was the cool kid on the block for a few months.

------
bnegreve
And I've just noticed that the "save file" icon in word processors isn't a
floppy disk as it used to be.

~~~
tanzam75
> _And I 've just noticed that the "save file" icon in word processors isn't a
> floppy disk as it used to be._

Maybe the one you're using. But the "Save" icon in the most popular word
processor is a 3.5" floppy disk:
[http://i.imgur.com/WLFtT7A.png](http://i.imgur.com/WLFtT7A.png)

This is the latest version -- Word 2013.

~~~
bnegreve
ahaha thanks :) I checked on LibreOffice and naively assumed that anything
else would have a more modern icon set.

------
Tichy
I've used floppy disks and tape recorders, but I'm a bit embarrassed that I
never used punch cards.

------
akhatri_aus
Seeing this made me smile. I haven't seen an A drive for ages now. I dont know
about the times before 1998 where most people have a nostalgic memory of
these, but they used to self corrupt like crazy all you had to fear was the
"Do you want to format Drive A?"

~~~
endgame
Once upon a midnight dreary, fingers cramped and vision bleary,

System manuals piled high and wasted paper on the floor,

Longing for the warmth of bedsheets,

Still I sat there, doing spreadsheets:

Having reached the bottom line,

I took a floppy from the drawer.

Typing with a steady hand, I then invoked the SAVE command

But got instead a reprimand: it read "Abort, Retry, Ignore."

[http://badpets.net/Humor/Tech/NeverMore.html](http://badpets.net/Humor/Tech/NeverMore.html)

------
wazoox
I had a Toshiba laptop once that came without any software floppies; instead
at first boot you had to generate the installation floppies for windows 95 and
MS Office. If I recall correctly it asked for something like 80 floppies.
Nightmare.

------
inlined
God I feel old. I'm getting flashbacks of a quarter mile sneakernet between my
friend & my house where we transferred MP3s on a floppy disk with multi-disk
zips.

------
Osiris
Luckily in Windows you can reassign drive letters in the Computer Management
tool. I've reassigned my two optical drives to A: and B:.

------
mseepgood
Seriously?

------
khill
TIL I am old.

------
ytch
It just like talking about programming on punch card to Generation Y

------
gutsy
OH man. Knowing the answer to this makes me feel so old.

So, sooooo old.

------
ktzar
Are we that old? :(

------
mariuolo
This comes out periodically.

------
sbt
Oh man I am getting old :)

------
_pferreir_
Now I really feel old.

------
lamontcg
FML I'm old

------
Aloha
I feel old.

------
amerika_blog
If I could, I'd start everyone off "learning" about computers by using an
Apple ][+. It is an open enough environment to learn just about everything,
and a restricted enough environment to encourage efficiency and elegant
design. After that, kick 'em upstairs to something modern with a Lisp compiler
and you've got 'em for life.

