• AnonTwo@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    I dunno why, I like how floppy disks look

    I’d be perfectly fine with floppy disks still if they had been able to remotely keep up with CD-DVD in speed and size.

    But also isn’t Modern Computing basically built upon an entire foundation of 30+ year old structures? I mean not just the Floppy Icon but on Windows A:\ is a reserved letter for the Floppy Drive, and that was a legacy from DOS.

    • TimeSquirrel@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Also, you cannot create a file named “con” in Windows, even in the latest versions. It’s a holdover from DOS where that word was reserved for the console. For example, you could type “copy con file.txt” to quickly create a text file from the command line and start entering text.

      • dan@upvote.au
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        1 year ago

        There’s another interesting fact here: MS-DOS 1.0 didn’t have directories… To print a text file, you could just do TYPE foo.txt > LPT1, since LPT1 wasn’t in a directory (like /dev on Linux).

        MS-DOS 2.0 added directories. However, to remain backwards compatible with 1.0, devices were still “global”. You could still run TYPE foo.txt > LPT1 regardless of which directory you were in.

        This is why you can’t create files names CON, LPT1, etc. in Windows. They’re reserved globally, which is a holdover from the original MS-DOS version from 1983.

      • argv_minus_one@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        You actually can, if you bypass some translation. \\?\C:\CON is a perfectly valid file path…and creating a file at that path will prevent almost all software from opening it! You can see it in File Explorer, but you can’t delete it without a command prompt.

    • argv_minus_one@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      Drive letters in general are a legacy holdover from MS-DOS. The Windows NT kernel doesn’t use them. It is a user-space DLL that maps the kernel’s single tree into drive letters.

      All other operating systems use a single tree with mount points instead. Windows supports mount points as well, but its default behavior is to assign a drive letter.

      Drive letters are still useful, though, if you have multiple drives and

      • they’re removable drives (optical disc drives, USB drives, etc), or
      • they’re internal, but you want to keep them separate (i.e. not RAID).

      Other platforms deal with this by reserving a subtree for mount points (/media on Linux, /Volumes on macOS), which is functionally equivalent to drive letters. This does have the advantage that mounted volumes are identified by a name rather than just a single letter, but on the other hand, the path to the mounted volume is longer and less convenient to type.