cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/62743547
We still pay homage to the old gods with the "save" icon
this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2026
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Fun fact: that's why we call them icons.
I was explaining to my kids about floppy disks, and mentioned the save icon. The what? The button you press to save. It just says "save" they said.
I think they use the Google suite at school, and apparently the save button just says "save". Although TBH I half expected them to not know of it because of auto-saving.
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"And the bios sayeth unto the user: Come forth and insert disk 23 of 30. And they did so. When the needle of the drive tested the disk, it had become corrupted, verily."
"Thus the monkey of the isle demanded Disk 114 be inserteth. Yet there was no Disk 114 and much confusion was sewn."
Adventure Island for NES stumped me for a while until I learned you had to do the thing
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Not joking but I did 1800 support for Windows 95 and at the end, right before 98, there was a constant problem with a specific floppy and people would like call us and we would try to send them a cd replacement but could send the fixed floppy. It was silly because it was the most common call for a bit. Like that batch of floppies all died at the same time
Windows people are starting to name their ssd a: and b:
It's horrible
The old ways are being forgotten. The oral history of the gray beards.
I had an xp install that defaulted my boot drive to H: and I never bothered to figure out why or change it.
H for Hard drive, duh 🤣
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I just need to pause and reflect on the level of commitment in that post. They started out strong, and just kept on going.
Absolutely outstanding.
Us Linux heathens never had any of the letter gods, we just worship the one and only, the beginning and the end, the alpha and the omega, the one true god:
/
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‘Dances with ribbons of mainframe tape’
Rise ye old ones RISE
I mean I purchased an external floppy for my undergrad laptop as recently as... 2004... Oh shit that was 22 years ago... Fuck a kid born a year later can legally buy alcohol and a kid born then is graduating from undergraduate....
When did I get old?
I remember building a computer in 2004 and finally making the decision to not include a floppy drive since I had just been booting from the CD drive for the past couple of issues anyways.
I was reminded of this several years later when I made the decision not to include a disk drive in my latest build.
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Back in the XP era, I set a hard drive to B and random installers would refuse to target it because they insisted it was too small. Good times.
I need a historical fantasy book in this concept.
i think even usb floppies show up as a:, don't they? i've not used windows for a decade now, thankfully.
You didn’t mention Arch. You’re not an Ubuntu user are you?
i think even usb floppies show up as a:, don’t they?
They do. And virtual floppy drives on a virtual machine show up as A:/B: too.
And the CD-ROM drive was D:
It was called "D" for "disk", duh.
(The above comment for legal purposes is a joke.)
"D" was actually used for "Drink Holder"
*disc
I was convinced I had seen the spelling 'disk' before, so I looked it up and found this (new to me) and interesting distinction on wiktionary.
In most varieties of English, disk is the preferred spelling for magnetic media (hence floppy disk, hard disk, disk drive), whereas disc is preferred for optical media (hence compact disc, digital versatile disc, optical disc). For all other uses, disk is preferred in American English and acceptable in Canadian English, and disc otherwise. Less commonly, disc is used for magnetic media (as in floppy disc and discette); similarly, disk is sometimes used for optical media, as in compact disk and optical disk.
But also both forms seem to be usable for geometric disc shapes.
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I experienced a time period where 3.5" discs coexisted with harddrives, but I've never seen a system where B: is actually used...
Going to show my age again now.
I think post 1990, they were rare. Essentially there was a time before that though, when computers often didn't have a hard drive. Because they were like 10MB and cost thousands of whatever your currency may be.
So in those days (8088/8086 based systems largely), it was common for there to be 2x5.25" drives. A: and B:. C: was a status symbol, the lambo of the early computer era.
As hard drives became more affordable (for levels of affordability), there was also the rise of the new disk type. 3.5". In that case it wasn't too uncommon to have a 3.5" drive, a 5.25" drive and a hard disk. So you'd have A:, B: and C:.
I think after the mid 90s the much more common setup was a single high density 3.5" drive A: and a hard disk C:. In the office we also had an F: drive (Novell netware network drive).
A: and B: were by and large kept free out of that history. I am pretty sure you can map HDDs/SSDs to them these days though if you want to.
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For that brief period in the mid-'90s I owned a PC with twin 3½" floppy drives. I never really used the second one, but I enjoyed the novelty and the fact that all my drive letters were in use. I also saw a handful of computers with both 3½" and 5¼" drives in some of the university PC labs. I don't think I ever saw anyone use the 5¼" slot of any of them, but the 3½" floppy drives got a decent amount of use.
Fun fact though: You could still use B: in DOS commands even if you only had an A: drive. The system would prompt you to switch disks as and when A: was about to pretend to be B: and then switch back afterwards.
Before hard drives it was pretty common for systems to have two floppy drives, A: and B:
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I got you, OP…
C:\DOS
C:\DOS\RUN
RUN\DOS\RUN
People talk about the legacy of the floppy disk (mid-eighties to mid-aughts) being used as a save icon, but drive letters are even more extreme - and absurd - than that.
CP/M came out in 1974 and introduced drive letters A: and B: for floppy drives, and Microsoft copied that for DOS and the early DOS-based versions of Windows. Microsoft finally killed off the DOS lineage with Windows Me in 2000, so that was 26 years of drive letters actually being part of the OS' architecture.
Windows NT came out in 1993 - 19 years after CP/M - and didn't use drive letters but for the sake of backwards compatibility and familiarity it would emulate them. All versions of Windows since 2000 are based on NT. So we had 26 years of drive letters being needed, and 33 years of faking it for consistency.
Tribute to all the old high priests who were executing the extended memory settings ritual based on each software requirements! We are the guardians of ancient knowledde!
You shall never be forgotten, sacred Amstrad 1512 DD, 512kB of RAM and Dual Drives, luxury of your time! Praise be to DR DOS an GEM Desktop!
TIL.
I was small when 5.25 floppies we're around. Never even questioned "C:"
I was too young to catch the 5.25 ones, but had a 3.5 floppy drive. For me the question was more of "where did B: go?"
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I was there, Gandalf.
My first computer was Tandy. 8088 chip, I think. Orange monochrome monitor. No hard drive, 2x 5.25 floppers. Folks' co-worker asked if anyone wanted it before tossing it out.
I'm not quite that old, though, there were the Apple IIs in the school lab.
I learned my first bit of programming right then, figuring out batch files. Everything had to be saved on disc immediately.
Man I was living the high life because this Tandy had a 2400 baud modem and I was soon acquainted with the wild world of BBSs.
I didn't care that it was in monochrome because playing Usurper or Trade Wars with strangers on someone's computer half a state away was way way cooler than the Nintendo, ha ha.
Man those were such good times.
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I remember A: being a floppy drive, but I never thought of hard being the opposite of floppy, lol
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And then there’s Linux, no pondering about media before, it just cares which it found after another on each interface upon boot.
Also, I’m sure the alphabet naming thing came from C/C++, which came after C, which borrowed from B, etc. And yes, there is a D, but people prefer scripting languages because reasons.
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