this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2025
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B is the real grandpa
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.
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.
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.
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I 100% assumed the same thing. Lol
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It's a code of honour at this point .... no one uses A: in respect for all those drives that died for our sins
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.
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.
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Don't worry about it. That rule hasn't been relevant in a long time since we no longer use floppy disks
My PC still has a floppy disc drive
Hipster?
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.
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My first PC is still in storage. It had
- A: 3.5 floppy
- B: 5.25 floppy
- C: HDD
- D: CD-RW
- E: ZIP drive
ZIP drives were a game changer at the time. We had no other (fast) way to move larger amounts of data in one shot without compressing / archiving over multiple disks.
Last year I dug a couple hundred zip disks out of my parents attic and bought an old zip drive off eBay so I could read them. They all still worked. My old data got moved to the cloud and the zip discs + drive went back to the attic. Perhaps in another 20 years I'll dig it out again if we still have USB ports on our systems haha.
Anyways, the USB thumb drive business killed iomega overnight.
I remember feeling cool when we got our ZIP 250 drive
Fellow zip and jaz drive enjoyer, those were halcyon days. Grandfather’s (and by extension, my first) PC was an IBM dual 5.25, and I still remember buying my first 2x cdrw, by TDK. Thing was finicky as all fuck and wasted many a burn, but it’s was glorious and burned my first mp3 CD.
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If you're not setting emojis as your drive letters, you're living in the past.
Incidentally, don't open the 😳: drive
B: entered the chat
Dudes with a B: were 1337
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.
There was also a period where you needed 3.5 AND 5.25 drives to use off the shelf software.
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Fun thing, when you attach a USB floppy drive on a modern Windows 11 system, it'll dutifully give it drive letter A: and even has a floppy drive icon. (Which admittedly doesn't look like a floppy drive. At all. But it has a floppy!)
And why yes, I've seen it a time or two in recent years, because I've been archiving some stuff. Imaging shitloads of old floppies.
Yeah and if you put a second one it's B:. At least on my slowly dying 7 machine.
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Brrrrr ck
Cachk-cachk
Nrrrrrrrrrr
Yeah i can hear that drive letter 35 years after the fact
Of course I know him, he's me!
/dev/sda1
Oh yeah, that reminds me of that time SO's PC had C: for the OS and D: for data and wanted to format it, so i booted it to DOS (i think it was still win 98 SE) and happily formatted C: only to discover that in DOS i was actually formatting D:... fun times.
I just realized I had forgotten about drive letters altogether.
Drive letters are one of the few things I miss about windows now that I'm on linux.
Drives letters are a pain in the ass. Especially when working with network drives.
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I miss floppies. Putting them in and taking them out was so satisfying. Remember when you had to install stuff with like a hundred of them? The ker-chicks and that smooth sliding feel as the sheath slid open....
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Sorry, been busy
Stuff to do.
My disk was a floppy until you walked by. Now it's solid state.
When I'm on Windows, I use subst A: %USERPROFILE%\GitHub to mount my local repos as drive A for shorter paths.
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drive letters are cursed
I’ve been a Mac user since 1989 and what is A:?
ETA: Never change Lemmy
Floppy disk drive.
A and B were reserved and your first hard disk drive was C.
The two disk drives had fixed memory addresses because they were often specific ports on the motherboard, and loaded the OS, etc. Things after that were more dynamic.
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i still kinda like the big floppy design. It just looks like it means business.
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Who here remembers turning part of the ide cable round to add a second floppy drive?
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