cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/62743547
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.
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?
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.
I used a floppy disk yesterday. In some businesses we use old equipment for a long time. Because it works.
Easy. At some point between then and now.
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.
We still pay homage to the old gods with the “save” icon
Fun fact: that’s why we call them icons.
I was explaining to my kids about floppy disks, and mentioned the save icon. The what? The button you press to save. It just says “save” they said.
I think they use the Google suite at school, and apparently the save button just says “save”. Although TBH I half expected them to not know of it because of auto-saving.
Me pressing ctrl-s all the time in a google docs window
They are trying to change those icons now, too. People dont recognize them so they use others.
I haven’t seen that, any examples?
I don’t why they’d change that either, just because they don’t know the origin, they still grew up knowing it meant “save.”
I remember seeing a program that used something else once, and when I worked in web apps and websites, there was always a debate about what to use.
A common one is a folder icon (or a tray) with a download arrow… DESPITE it being used to save locally. Same thing with a cloud with a down arrow.
Some other programs used to use the icon for a hard disk, the three circular platters.
If I remember the app, Ill give better examples of programs that use other things.
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.
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:
/
is that on /dev/sda ?
It’s wherever came loading from initramfs and vmlinuz. Basically, whatever BIOS/UEFI found as the Lord of the Roots.
It’s always there, even before anything is mounted. You just overlay a filesystem over it during boot.
I need a historical fantasy book in this concept.
But they were, all of them, deceived, for another drive was made.
Yeah /dev/sda
It used to be /dev/hd0. On OpenBSD, it’s often /dev/wd0
I found out about an unlimited drive that big tech doesn’t want you to know about, it’s called /dev/null
I think Sam Altman doesn’t want you to know about /dev/shm
/dev/shm is antiquated and inefficient. It’s now recommended to use /dev/datacenter
It’s amazing how much you can store in /dev/null
“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.”
“Thus the monkey of the isle demanded Disk 114 be inserteth. Yet there was no Disk 114 and much confusion was sewn.”
Adventure Island for NES stumped me for a while until I learned you had to do the thing
Appreciate you talking in code to avoid spoilers for a game released in 1986.
Would hate to spoil that for anyone
Not joking but I did 1800 support for Windows 95 and at the end, right before 98, there was a constant problem with a specific floppy and people would like call us and we would try to send them a cd replacement but could send the fixed floppy. It was silly because it was the most common call for a bit. Like that batch of floppies all died at the same time
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.
Windows people are starting to name their ssd a: and b:
It’s horrible
The old ways are being forgotten. The oral history of the gray beards.
I had an xp install that defaulted my boot drive to H: and I never bothered to figure out why or change it.
H for Hard drive, duh 🤣
I use B: for my BluRay drive. Seemed appropriate.
We won’t talk about what ray the A: drive is.
Eh, that sounds like a fun idea to me. I think it’d be nostalgic. I’m gonna look into that, actually :)
I got you, OP…
C:\DOS
C:\DOS\RUN
RUN\DOS\RUN
‘Dances with ribbons of mainframe tape’
Rise ye old ones RISE
And the CD-ROM drive was D:
It was called “D” for “disk”, duh.
(The above comment for legal purposes is a joke.)
“D” was actually used for “Drink Holder”
*disc
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.
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.
Not the greatest week for grammar nazis either it seems
It’s a Windows convention, but, if you are old enough, it was a DOS convention and a CP/M convention.
