A: B: were for dual floppy drives. per dos manual. and fuck off with back slashes. forward slash is fs root / drives are devices under /dev.
this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2026
845 points (98.8% liked)
Microblog Memes
12503 readers
1305 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
RULES:
- Your post must be a screen capture of a microblog-type post that includes the UI of the site it came from, preferably also including the avatar and username of the original poster. Including relevant comments made to the original post is encouraged.
- Your post, included comments, or your title/comment should include some kind of commentary or remark on the subject of the screen capture. Your title must include at least one word relevant to your post.
- You are encouraged to provide a link back to the source of your screen capture in the body of your post.
- Current politics and news are allowed, but discouraged. There MUST be some kind of human commentary/reaction included (either by the original poster or you). Just news articles or headlines will be deleted.
- Doctored posts/images and AI are allowed, but discouraged. You MUST indicate this in your post (even if you didn't originally know). If an image is found to be fabricated or edited in any way and it is not properly labeled, it will be deleted.
- Absolutely no NSFL content.
- Be nice. Don't take anything personally. Take political debates to the appropriate communities. Take personal disagreements & arguments to private messages.
- No advertising, brand promotion, or guerrilla marketing.
RELATED COMMUNITIES:
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
I get you, but it'd fuck up my title, and it was also 1996 the last time I used them.
- i was hacking config.sys and autoexec.bat to optimize memory for games. after enough lock-ups, i dove into linux. just deleted my last unused windows partition. cost me a hundred dollars 20 years ago.
I want to know at what point people started saying the clunkier “hard disk drive” instead of just “hard drive”, because it definitely happened.
Hail Hard Drive! Praised be its name!
Do not cite the Deep Magic to me, Witch! I was there when it was written.
And before A: and B:, we had cassette tape decks for our Commodores!
It took 40 minutes to load a program.
You don't know what a cassette or a Commodore is, do you? Damn kids, get off my lawn
LOAD "*",1,1
LOAD "*",8,1 if you had a fancy 1541
To this day, the most advanced floppy drive ever made.
I remember having to bang on it to realign the heads
I had a cassette drive for my CoCo3 from RadioShack.
I spent a weekend typing in code in BASIC from a magazine to play a shitty pacman clone, tried to save it to the tape, and forgot the first few inches on a new cassette aren't magnetic and can't save anything...
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
/ did not care but it was the way of the penguin, the child of the even older gods of ix.
/dev/sda
How hard was that?
Don't forget /dev/mmcblk0p1 and /dev/nvme0n1p4how4fucking7long1must6these5get
You can blame them on systemd.
To be fair I blame everything on system d
What happened to systems a-b-c.. ?
You've got me sweating now thinking about this. What happened before System-V and sysvinit?
Oddly (or not, depending on your views on versioning) System V was preceded by System III which was actually the first version.
load more comments
(2 replies)
I remember seeing my first pc with two 5.25" drives. the luxury! you could have two entire data sets accessible, you could jump from one program to another without changing disks....
then a few years later I got a 20mb hdd, and copied almost everything I owned to it - and still had 3 mb free. a: and b: were nice, but boy wow this hard drive thing was mindblowing
And here's me with my one terabyte drive and it's nearly full. Of what I really couldn't say, I don't feel like I have all that much saved on here, but apparently it takes up a whole terabyte.
it's ok, you can admit it, it's fulla goat porn.
hot, steamy, bleaty goat porn. hooves and horns everywhere.
Actually it's because C: is a happy drive and wants to show it. D: is less positive about things.
The :D drive on the other hand is just ecstatic.
load more comments
(3 replies)
My piano also starts on C 🤔
That’s unusual - the vast majority of modern pianos start on an A.
load more comments
(3 replies)
When I was a wee child we had a box of floppy disks for my first computer. They were all the colors of the rainbow, 5 for each color, and my little neurodivergent self got so much satisfaction sorting them to be in order of the color wheel (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, etc) and I also loved carefully using them as a fidget toy by flipping the little metal piece that covered the disk itself back and forth repeatedly.
I really miss floppy disks for some dumb reason. I wish they'd bring them back with the same type of technology that is used in micro SD cards, solely for the nostalgia factor.
load more comments
(2 replies)
But why a backslash as separator? Why ô why!
When they added directories to DOS, they decided that the colons used as a separator on the DEC system they were basing it on were silly, and the forward slashes used by Unix were nicer. Forward slashes were already the character used to identify something as a command line option rather than a filename on DOS, though, because the world hadn't settled on Unix's dash convention yet, and lots of existing software just checked whether an argument contained forward slashes to decide whether or not it was a filename. That software would break if paths could contain forward slashes. However, there was a tempting character on the keyboard originally used to type ∨ and ∧ before unicode that was also a slash, so they used that.
No no, the real question is why CR LF instead of LF or CR? Why two characters for a line break motherfuckers?
Because Teleprinters! Carriage return goes back to the start of the line, line feed goes to the next line. If you wanted "bold" on a teleprinter you just did a CR without the LF and printed the same text over the top again.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
D: was usually a cd drive, and E: was the second cd but this time it wrote those disks.
Then later E became D, and died such...
Anything after C:\ was basically as you wanted, no? It might have been an optical drive, it might have been a second HDD.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(3 replies)
Wouldn't careful alignment be 5.25, and the click be 3.5? Or am I way off here? 5.25 are the big black actual floppy discs right? And then 3.5 or the smaller encased in harder shelled plastic with the little snappy metal sliding piece?
Also, what is going up with the letter p in this screenshot?:
It's all the letters along that column. There's a weird artifacting that bolds everything along that line.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(13 replies)
I’m not reading all that. Upvote.
You should, though. It's beatiful!
view more: next ›