Happy New Year!…….
Somehow made it to 2007…… Hope everybody survived all the New Year celebrations and are recovering on this, the first day of the New Year…… I’m starting out with a new hard drive in my computer installed by none other than Jek, who was in for the holidays, got stranded a couple of extra days due to the weather in Denver, which gave him the time to install it….. Although, he only had time to get me up and running with the O.S. and Internet access…… I get to install all my other programs and restore what data I need……. With 80 gig, I won’t have to worry about running out of memory space ever again!……
While we were installing the hard drive, I noticed something that I guess I had not noticed before….. Why is there no B-Drive?….. You have an A-Drive, which is usually a floppy drive, and then it skips to C-Drive, and on and on down the alphabet….. What happened to “B”?….. Computer Dummies like me want to know……
January 1st, 2007 at 3:02 pm
“…I won’t have to worry about running out of memory space ever again!” How many times have I heard THAT before.
January 1st, 2007 at 5:12 pm
Well, back before hard disks were so prevalent, many machines had dual floppies denoted by a: and b:.
January 2nd, 2007 at 11:23 am
Most computers I have ever owned never had a B: drive. The A Drive was for floppy disk, the C: for your Hard Drive D: for CD Drive. Although if you partition your hard drive it usually assigns C & D for your hard drive & E for you CD/DVD Drive. I guess the computer gods made that decision long ago, because most software you buy & install defaults to your C: drive when installing.
January 2nd, 2007 at 3:14 pm
Early on in the PC era there were 5-1/4″ floppy drives, and then 3.5″ floppy drives. Often you might have one of each (A: and B:), or if you only had one size then you might have two drives in order to facilitate easier copying of disks. It just became convention that your primary hard drive would be assigned C:.
As for myself — It’s now been 6 years since I’ve even owned a computer with _ANY_ floppy drive. If I need to move files around I do it over a network (whether my home network or the internet) or if that isn’t an option, just burn it to CD. I think I still have a few old floppy disks (even some old 5-1/4″!) collecting dust somewhere…
January 2nd, 2007 at 8:45 pm
I own several old programs on 5 1/4″ floppies. Once in a while I get nostalgic & would like to use them again. However, XP has a problem running most of them. I have tried the XP compatibility program, however most of them still don’t work properly.
I have a couple of old computers lying around I was thinking of loading
just MS-DOS in order to utilize these programs. Is there anything out there that would let me use 2 computers & share 1 monitor? If so, any idea of what the cost would be?
January 4th, 2007 at 5:03 pm
I remember that now….. I used to have a 5 1/4 and a 3 1/2 floppy drives at the same time…… I had forgotten about the BIG floppy’s, although I still have some of them around here someplace…… Thanks for jogging my memory…… Maybe I need a brain hard drive upgrade to expand my memory….. Couldn’t hurt….. Well, maybe it would hurt!…. Ouch!…..
January 4th, 2007 at 7:17 pm
Actually, back before PCs there were 8″ floppies, too! I remember my grandfather had a CP/M computer that used 8″ floppies.
And Sunn, yes, there is something to share a monitor — it’s called a KVM switch, short for Keyboard, Video, Mouse, because you use one keyboard, one monitor and one mouse with multiple computers. You can find them all over Ebay. Just make sure you get one that has the right connections for your computer (traditional keyboard port vs. USB, serial mouse vs. PS2 mouse vs. USB, etc).
January 4th, 2007 at 7:41 pm
I used to think the 8″ floppies were cool! In the mid80s, my dad had a Kaypro 2x with the dual DS/DD 5 1/4″ floppies. I remember lusting after the 8″ aftermarket external drives, which I think held 800 kB (compared to 400 kB on the internals). I’ve done my share of CP/M time — lots of Wordstar.
January 5th, 2007 at 12:47 am
Thanks, TTop, I’ll check it out.
January 15th, 2007 at 1:47 pm
Actually MR you don’t have any 5.25s’ anymore you gave them all to me. unless you still have a box unknown.