On the bee road, in his bee car. Clearly.
Wow, what a flashback. As soon as I saw the thread my first thought was "the B:\ drive, I guess we don’t have those anymore.
BTW I could be wrong, but I recall A:\ being the 5.25 and then b:\ being the 3.5 since people got the 3.5 later on.
And for the record. My first computer was an Apple IIe with (obviously) no hard drive. (Remember HAVING to put a disk in for something to happen, as opposed to having things stop happeneing if you leave a disk in). My first PC…hmmm…I’m thinking it was a 386 or 486. I’m 99% sure it wasn’t a 286 or 8086. I do remember it was BEFORE windows 3.1. It ran soley on DOS. Until we got Headstart Enviroment. Does ANYONE remember Headstart? It was probably one of the first GUIs but all it really was was a way to change directories with a mouse in stead of by typing. Just out of curiosity, are there any CD-ROMS that still use caddies?
If you are operating a Windows machine and it has a single floppy drive installed, put a floppy drive (with files on it) in the drive, open a DOX box and type “copy a:. b:”
To put dates on this, IIRC, dual floppies were the standard from when the IBM-PC was introduced around 1981, till the XT (with a hard drive) was introduced around 1986. My first PC was a 1984 Compaq with (hold onto your hats) two double-sided double-density floppy drives. This retailed for about $3,000. And, yes, the application disk generally went in the a: drive and data in the b: drive. Yup, kids, MS Word used to run from a single 360K disk!
BTW, I’m one of the few people I’ve ever known who had Windows 1.0. It was basically a novelty program, which attempted to permit multiple applications to be open at the same time, but CPUs of the day couldn’t really handle the demand, so it didn’t catch on till we passed the 386 milestone.
You guys are totally missing the wonders of the Timex/Sinclair 1000. It was wonderful, with it’s membrane keyboard and “shortcut” BASIC commands. What was really cool was how the keyboard would become too hot to touch after about an hour. The 16k RAM add-on pack also would periodically fall off, losing whatever program was running.
Ah, those were the days.
We had some random HP machine in our lab we used for plotting with an 8" floppy.
But real old timers loaded the assembler from a mylar paper tape, then loaded their program from another. You never dropped and shuffled a paper tape.
Ripping it was something else.
My B: drive is an Iomega Zip Drive.
Pseudo-hijack: Do computers still require an A: drive to function? I don’t think I’ve used my floppy drive in years.
Nope. In fact, many PCs don’t even have floppy drives anymore. I suppose if you wanted to make a boot disk and didn’t want to use a CD, you could use a thumb drive, but I’m not certain.
(Aging fart alert) Did no-one else use CPM and 8" floppies?
Not really. You can load the OS from a CD so boot floppies are no longer needed. Many computers, especially laptops, don’t even have a floppy drive these days. Thumb drives are used to transfer files from place to place, which eliminates that use for floppies as well.
I’ve used an 8" floppy. I’ve also programmed on punch cards. Sign me up for the old geek folks home, I think I’m ready.
The 8" floppy was only used on high end systems. It was ungodly expensive compared to the 5 1/4.
Stacks of punch cards need to be held together with TWO rubber bands, and each card needs to be numbered in case you still manage to drop them (lessons learned the hard way).
Back in the 8086 days, it was common to boot off of the A drive and leave the DOS floppy in the drive, then run your program off of the B drive.
At some point, dual floppy systems became less popular, and DOS/Windows was modified to basically ask you to switch disks if you tried to change to the B drive and the B drive wasn’t there.
Windows 3.0 ran on a 286. Windows 3.1 introduced “386 enhanced mode” but from the user’s point of view it still looked exactly like windows 3.0.
Pffft. The Commodore 64 had dedicated graphics hardware that was vastly superior to anything in the IBM line. The result was that the 286, with its faster cpu and gobs more ram, was actually SLOWER for games than the Commodore. I was less than impressed. I also had a schematic drawing package that would bring an XT to its knees. It was fine when you first started out, but once the drawing got complicated, you didn’t dare move or resize the screen because it could literally take 5 minutes for a screen refresh. It was a little bit better on a 286, but not much. I was happy to have a hard drive, instead of dealing with dual floppies all the time, but other than that I wasn’t that impressed. I had to partition the hard drive into two logical drives, since DOS at the time couldn’t handle anything bigger than 32 MB.
Btw, the first computer I had pretty much unlimited access to was a TRS-80 Model 1 (4K, yes K, of RAM, and a cassette drive, wheee!). The first computer I actually owned though was a Commodore 64. I did my senior project in college on an Apple IIe.
In some ways, I miss the days when computers were shipped with schematics and rom listings. In a lot of ways, though, I don’t.
Hell, my first computer was Digicomp.
In any case, before hard drives, the A: drive was your program disk and the B: drive was your data disk.
Can’t believe no-one’s mentioned this yet, but the B drive was a second floppy drive (and I remember some computers with no hard disc at all). Later it became conventional to use B as an alias for A so you could copy a:. to b:., swapping discs when prompted.
8" discs? Ah, I remember when we had 'em at <0.25meg formatted. Great days, great days.
Bob Stevens cartoon. An old fighter pilot is telling a story to a group of young fighter pilots.
‘There I was, hanging by my prop…’
‘What’s a prop, sir?’
Yes. The machine I referred to in my post earlier used CP/M-86. Remember the commands that would make little or no sense to the average end user? “Pip” for “copy,” and so forth?
I can say I actually worked with punch cards. Of course, my work consisted of being one of the young guys in the department so “you two can toss all these old boxes of punch cards out”. One of the old guys in the department shed a tear when we heaved out the old card sorter and we were laughing about how archaic it was. We joked about making a computer out of “Stone knives and bearskins”.
Jim
Hah, now I’m all nostalgic for unix.
My father had a copy of Windows 1.0. I think he tossed it before I was old enough to see it, but I did see a copy of it in the Smithsonian once.
Now that I think about it, the only time I ever used dual floppy drives were the varous types of the Apple II at school. By the time the family had a 286 we used the hard drive for whatever version of DOS it was and Windows 3.0. Sure, we had both sizes of floppy drives in the thing, but they just got used as application drives–no need to boot off them.
My first ‘home’ computer was a TRS-80 much like the one pictured in the link. I’d spend hours writing programs and saving/loading them from cassette tape.
My first programming was done on IBM Punch Cards
And I’m only 44 years old!
We didn’t use knives, but just really pointed rocks to get the holes in our bear skin. Though bearskin was used only used when we could splurge on really good unerasable media back then. Normally we had to use the rock to make indentations on the ground and hope to Og that it didn’t rain that day so that we could run payroll. Don’t laugh, have you ever tried to cash a check that was imprinted on a fallow corn field?
Seriously, the first computer I used that had a b:\ drive was a Tandy 1400 laptop. It ran MS Dos 3.2, had dual floppies, one for the OS and one for the data. It also had a 1200 bps modem that was the fastest around (circa 1987).
Oh, and I wanted to second what Chrisk pointed out. Yes, a lot of times the A: and b: were for two floppies, but it also allowed you a neat way to copy to two different floppies with one drive.
Typing in “copy a: b:” if you only had a single drive would first read the a: drive, then prompt you to put in the destination disk, and it would copy, and continue prompting you to switch disks until you were done.
Oh yeah, and this was probably on a 5 1/4 inch floppy with a wopping 360K of storage space!