• Rose@slrpnk.net
      11·
      3 天前

      Yeah, I always thought the drive letters weren’t a very elegant solution to the problem. Can have only 26 devices. Should just use numbers. You can fit 256 devices in one-byte integer identifier! Like how tape drive is 1 and printer is 4 and floppy drives are 8, 9 and so on.

      spoiler

      Commodore 64 peripherals

      • Onsotumenh@discuss.tchncs.de
        1·
        3 天前

        OMV (NAS OS based on Debian) assigns each drive a UUID and mounts them under that. It takes a bit time to get used to, but already paid off when I had to shuffle around drives and cards cause of an upgrade.

  • kersploosh@sh.itjust.worksOPM
    1191·
    3 天前

    I was adding a second drive to a Windows desktop the other day and was tempted to assign it A:. I just couldn’t do it, though. It felt like I was violating some unspoken rule.

    • BootLoop@sh.itjust.works
      93·
      3 天前

      Knowing Windows there’s some legacy piece of code that checks if there’s a floppy in drive A: and assigning a drive to it makes the OS fail to boot or something.

      • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        6·
        3 天前

        I wonder how UEFI treats it; diskette drives were kind of sacred in the old BIOS days. How modern Windows handles it is anyone’s guess, I’m sure it’s been rewritten by Copilot by now.

      • DarkSirrush@piefed.caEnglish
        34·
        3 天前

        Some dumbass at my workplace assigned a network folder to D:, and made it a department standard (along with 20 other network folders assigned their own drive letters) and so now you can’t access external drives if you restart the computer with one plugged in.

        Because windows assigns D:\ to the flash drive before user initialization, and then overwrites it with the network drive when they log in, which breaks both for that session.

    • IninewCrow@lemmy.caEnglish
      75·
      3 天前

      It’s a code of honour at this point … no one uses A: in respect for all those drives that died for our sins

      • TexasDrunk@lemmy.world
        31·
        3 天前

        About 15 years ago there was a company I did some work for (I was at an MSP at the time) who wanted to virtualize certain systems. Great. No problem. Except those systems needed to read floppies. Ok, I can pass it through. Except they wanted to get away from floppies. Great, let’s get you a newer system from a different vendor because this one went out of business when NT4 was still the big dog. Nope, too much money and the process would change.

        So I had to reregister every DLL by hand because the installation didn’t work on Server 2008 r2. And every few months it would have to be done again because one of the guys thought himself a genius and kept messing up the janky ass workflow we put together to download info from thumb drives to a virtual floppy.

        So plug in the drive, janky ass script creates a virtual floppy in drive A of the server, and manually (eventually I just wrote a script because I didn’t want to get that call on a Saturday) register each DLL every so often. And they’d rather pay the company I worked for several hundred dollars a month than pay a couple of grand one time that would have paid for itself in less than a year.

        • Kowowow@lemmy.ca
          4·
          3 天前

          Oh thumb drive to virtual floppy sounds like when I had to work on old cnc machines that had a few modern upgrades

        • IninewCrow@lemmy.caEnglish
          20·
          3 天前

          lol … I had this kind of argument with my wife for years.

          She kept buying the smallest bottles of dish washing liquid for years … if it was smaller, to her it was much cheaper. I kept telling her that the price for the small bottle was more expensive per liter of liquid compared to buying it all in bulk.

          I kept telling her that if you just bought one giant bottle for the best price when it went on sale, you’d end up buying more liquid and saving money over time. I’d buy a big huge bottle every year or so and it would last us months, then she’d revert to buying small bottles again.

          Eventually, she realized that it was cheaper in the long run to buying big bottles … mostly because when you bought one giant bottle, you’d forget the problem altogether for about six months or even a year.

          • LumpyPancakes@piefed.socialEnglish
            4·
            3 天前

            I know an OAP who pays two lots of $59 a month for two mobile phones. ‘you get more calls that way’. But it’s a big data plan - even the smallest phone plans have unlimited calls. Heck, one is a flip phone with no data. Can’t convince her she only needs to pay $23 each though.

          • korazail@lemmy.myserv.oneEnglish
            2·
            3 天前

            Heads up. Vendors are on to us. Bulk now equals convenience. Double check unit prices before assuming buying the larger quantity is more cost effective.

            Sometimes there’s is now a small, medium and large package and medium is the best buy.

    • airbornestar@lemmy.zip
      132·
      3 天前

      Don’t worry about it. That rule hasn’t been relevant in a long time since we no longer use floppy disks

          • TemplaerDude@sh.itjust.works
            15·
            3 天前

            Nah it’s just like 11 years old and I still had some floppies sitting around back then with stuff on it. I haven’t used it in years.

              • TemplaerDude@sh.itjust.works
                1·
                3 天前

                You know, I actually don’t know, it was a gift from my father who paid for it to get built, I’ve never actually checked the connection…

              • BeardedGingerWonder@feddit.ukEnglish
                2·
                3 天前

                Just plug in an ISA card, duh.

                Seriously though you’ve sent me down a rabbit hole that doesn’t have a satisfactory ending (yet). Some kind of LPC to FDC adapter seems to be potentially possible on some motherboards, but haven’t found any concrete evidence of someone having done that yet.

                Most practical solution is to use an external USB drive, strip the casing, print a plate and wire the cable to the onboard USB header on the mobo.

                This may get further research 😂

    • A_Very_Big_Fan@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      3 天前

      I assigned my 18TB HDD to A because my second drive is B and my main drive is C, so I have to complete the pattern or my brain will explode.

      • PhobosAnomaly@feddit.uk
        24·
        3 天前

        and/or well financially off.

        In fairness, it was largely a convenience tax. Through my Atari ST, early PC, and (to a minimal degree) Amiga days, two or more drives just reduced the need for disk-swapping.

        However… I’m not saying things were done on an industrial scale; but Xcopy with two drives was like trading a Vauxhall Nova for a Lambo Countach.

            • ReluctantMuskrat@lemmy.world
              1·
              3 天前

              A 386 with no hard drive was crazy even then. My first was an 8088 (though technically a NEC v20) with a 5.25" and a 20 MB hard drive

          • PhobosAnomaly@feddit.uk
            9·
            3 天前

            holy jesus, I thought I’d banished the actual floppy disk to the back of my mind, particularly the DS ones.

            You know what, it’s easy to rag on the devs at the time, but they worked with what they had. Good on them.

    • Bluewing@lemmy.world
      3·
      3 天前

      I’m glad my punch tape drive is long gone. We used a paper punch tape reel to reel on a garden cart to wheel around the shop floor to load CNC programs onto CNC mills. Often with hand written gcode. Gods, I hated that thing. Floppies were far faster and far more reliable.