mairving — Mon, 25 Jun 2001 19:21:56 +0000

Merlin, you forgot to mention back when they were called floppies for a reason and 5-1/4" was a new smaller size. Hold on while I get my hankie.

Oh yeah, and when you new color screen (amber on black) came in. Much better on the eyes.

merlin — Mon, 25 Jun 2001 13:14:14 +0000

ohoh, the times, when you had to boot from floppies... and the tiny little green letters on the black screen. the times of 'beep' as the only sign of life.

Megan — Thu, 21 Jun 2001 20:20:08 +0000

Thank you! I remember now that our old Commodore 64 had two floppy drives.

mairving — Thu, 21 Jun 2001 20:09:50 +0000

I tell you, you young whippersnappers don't know about the old days back in DOS. The reason that there is a B, is because in the early days before hard drives were invented, the OS and all programs ran off of a floppy. In the DOS world the floppy became the A: drive, a bit different on the Unix side though. Then someone decided to have a computer that had two floppy drives. So DOS recognized the second drive as the B: drive. Later when the hard drive came out, it became the C: drive and up with different partitions. The B drive is still designated as the second floppy drive and really can't be used for much anything less. You can't make a B drive out of a hard drive either.

So there, you mystery is solved.

mjames — Thu, 21 Jun 2001 20:00:49 +0000

Actually, you can technically make a "B" drive. You can rename your drivers, not sure exactly how, though. This can also be done when partitioning.

Anyway, that's just another wonder in our world.