Drive C: forever ?

[vulcanised]

Just musing, nothing of importance........

When home computers started to encroach on people's lives around 40 years ago, someone decided that C: would be the main drive for the BIOS to use, with A: being a 3.5" floppy, and B: being an even floppier 5.25".

Nothing I've seen has changed in the BIOS. Should it?

[Milo Minderbinder]

before much longer drive letters will be irrelevant, and data will simply be accessed via a storage database which will allocate locations depending on file type / size etc

When we have universal internet connectivity and permanently accessible cloud storage, the actual data location won't matter to you. - whether its held locally or remotely. As long as you can search the database list of files and find what you want, thats all that matters
The Microsoft Search utility was intended as a first step down this route, but got stagnated when M$ pulled back on using their new file system in Vista

[mixture]

Old habits die hard in relation to the naming of C drive.

Also there are a lot of lazy developers out there who write software that assumes the presence of C.

[Saab Dastard]

You can allocate B to a fixed disk, certainly in Win2K3 and above.

I think that A: is still reserved for floppy disk - although that may only be where the system detects a FDD controller on the motherboard, even if there isn't a FDD physically installed.

SD

[Loose rivets]

Rant mode: ON

I HATE having the tree showing anything "above" C drive: Desktop - Public - Fred - Computer. Nothing should be above C . . . unless it's flopperized.

And yes, why do some people not give the option to browse for a location?

Rant mode: OFF

I NEVER want to find my Operating System muddled with anything but APPs - and only those allowed in C because one has to reload them anyway. All of that area must be able to be stripped clean without the need to remove one's life history contained in jpg files.


I have a strange yearning to know where my stuff is. I'd even like instant de-frag and a picture of where it was on the platter. I have no idea why, just I suppose, having had to know where one stored punched cards. :hmm:

[Spitoon]

...with A: being a 3.5" floppy, and B: being an even floppier 5.25"Just a note for historical accuracy, if we're talking about the early days of IBM PC/MS-DOS machines, A: was reserved for a 5¼" floppy drive whilst B: was reserved for those with the desire and dosh for a second floppy drive - really handy for things like saving data. Of course, Winchester disks (as early HDDs were commonly known) plugged into a PC were just a dream.....not least because, surely, no-one needed more than 360K storage.

[vulcanised]

So where do/did 8" drives (which I've never even seen) fit into the scheme of things?

Non-PC (sic) I suppose.

[Milo Minderbinder]

Pre -PC
I only ever used them on DEC PDP-11 and Cromenco / Dynatech Unix "minicomputers"
(Now theres a dated term if ever there was one....)

[srobarts]

8" floppies were used on the IBM Displaywriter which I was selling then. The floppies were also used on the IBM System32.Those were the days when I sold inkjet printers for £6000 and my Cortina Estate cost me £1500!
Ooops sorry for thread creep.

I should also add that the original IBM PC that was launched in the UK in 1983 came with 1 or 2 5.25 floppies. The XT launched later in 1983 had one 5.25 floppy and a ginormous 10Mb hard disk. The 3.5 floppy did not arrive until later. Much of the history of drive letters stems from some early program writers who hard coded drive letters in their programs.
I came across one such program in the early 90s when the program was written( by a major firm of accountants) to read program modules fronm Drive C and write data to drive D. One manufacturer changed their models from two smaller hard drives to one larger one. Net result the program would not run, the programmer had long since disappeared, one unworkable system until the manufacturer supplied the second hard drive.

One amusing aside of the early PC days was IBM PC Dos - it arrived on a floppy and if you used the type command to display a file, one of the DOS modules came up with "Microsoft Rules - OK?" on the screen.

[eppy]

Just a few minor corrections.
It was 30 years ago, not 40 years ago.
A: and B: were both for 360k 5.25 inch floppy drives . The 3.5 inch drive wouldn't be invented until the IBM PS/2 arrived in 1984. However A: andB: have been reserved for removeable storage ever since for historical compatibility reasons.

[srobarts]

Just a couple of corrections....
PS/2 was 1987
the 3.5 disk arrived on the IBM range in the late model IBM AT

and just an aside in South Africa they call the 3.5 a stiffy

[le Pingouin]

You guys need to get out more! The drive lettering convention is purely an operating system thing & nothing to do with the BIOS (other than sometimes using the same labels for the floppies because people are familiar with it).

Yes, you could name your 3.5" diskette drive "stiffy" in Linux & the like if you wanted :ok:

[Bushfiva]

NEC used A: as the hard drive. It had a special version of DOS that only worked on its machines.

[Milo Minderbinder]

"The drive lettering convention is purely an operating system thing & nothing to do with the BIOS"

Not true
The floppy controller works at a BIOS level. Thats why in most older BIOSes you wer able to swap the A: and B: drive allocations in the BIOS..

[bnt]

If you get to try a UNIX system (Mac OS X, Linux, etc.), you'll see that they don't use drive letters for access. Instead, everything appears under a single virtual file system. For example, this Linux netbook I'm using now has two solid state hard drives; at the low level, they are different devices (/dev/sda and /dev/sdb), and each has one partition (/dev/sda1 and /dev/sdb1). The first one contains the OS itself, and is mounted as / (the root): the second one contains all user data and is mounted as /home (i.e "under" /).

If I only had one drive & partition, /home would just be another directory on it, but the point is that either way it's always consistent to applications and users. One advantage is that I can completely wipe the first drive and reinstall Linux on it, without touching the user data on the second drive. I'll be putting Linux on another 1-drive system soon, and so I'll be setting up a separate partition for /home for that reason.

I wish that Windows had that kind of option more easily available, but the security system they use would play havoc when it comes to reinstallation. I know it can be done afterwards with mount points, but not during installation.

[Milo Minderbinder]

I wish that Windows had that kind of option more easily available

The blurb from Microsoft seems to suggest that Windows 8 WILL have that kind of recovery system

[le Pingouin]

Milo, as bnt says for Unix type OSes drives have a /dev reference & you then mount them to wherever you like to access them.

/dev/fd0 is the first floppy drive as defined in the BIOS, /dev/fd1 the second & so forth.

You then mount the drive to access the diskette - the mount point takes whatever name you want, although there are conventions & pre-configured options.

You could even unmount fd0 & subsequently mount fd1 to the same mount point, say /media/stiffy.

[Loose rivets]

One was inordinately proud of one's IBM XT Luggable. Two floppies, and a slot to fit an upgrade to 640k. Very nervous about busting something when I put the clone card in, but off it went.

I earned a bunch of money one weekend when a factory's CPM computer went TU the day before the changeover to a new PC based Novel Network. After repairing the computer, I called on a university that was the custodian of Kermit??? I think. Translated the disc format to the new 5 1/4. Then from CPM. I will never forget the relief I felt as the company's entire stock and parts lists poured onto the new hard drives.

[bnt]

Kermit (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kermit_%28protocol%29)! (shudder). I have some horrid memories of trying to deal with non-universal serial buses like RS-232, transferring files using ZModem or LapLink. Kids today have no idea how lucky they are, now we have a Universal Serial Bus (USB) that does just about anything.

I remember that Linux used to make it really hard to access removable devices such as USB drives. On a secure multi-user system (which it is), no user should just be able to plug in a storage device and access it: it's a potential security hole. So the root user had to set up the device in advance and give it the required permissions. It's a lot easier these days, at least under the popular desktop distributions such as Ubuntu. You plug in a device as a "standard" user, it comes up mounted as /media/label, where the label is the label given to the drive under any OS. It's made backing up etc. a pleasure. But if I need to set up a secure system that can't access USB devices, I could just remove those "friendly" components.

[Loose rivets]

I had to explain to the uni that they had some responsibility to British industry when they suggested I call back after the summer holidays. Running my own company, I got good at making my point. Twas on the doorstep in 36 hours.

I remember thousand quid telephone bills, much of it breathing fire at suppliers, just trying to maintain standards. But it was about a thousand times more stressful than airline flying.


Mind you, it was rather a cheek asking for (today's equivalent) of about ten grand to do the work, considering I'd sold them the new system. Still, that was the heyday of computing. Nice while it lasted.

[mixture]

Kermit! (shudder). I have some horrid memories of trying to deal with non-universal serial buses like RS-232, transferring files using ZModem or LapLink. Kids today have no idea how lucky they are, now we have a Universal Serial Bus (USB) that does just about anything.


If you're a kid of today who has to deal with business/carrier grade routers, you still need to know your way around a null-modem cable as they continue to be used as OOB access (and generally also as a file transfer mechanism if you mess up firmware upgrades through the more friendly channels).

[Milo Minderbinder]

Null modem cable. I've got them, but not used one in ten years or more since the days of Win98. I didn't even realise that would work in Vista / 7
I know a parallel crossover won't work, I'd assumed a COM port crossover wouldn't as well