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
The 3.5 Floppy A’s… My school was underfunded and in 2008 we used floppy disks for our writing assignments. Other schools had flash drives and you weren’t allowed to use your own because they, “weren’t secure.”
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.
Second HDD!? What for? Did you ran out of your 36MB? *
*36mb was my first drive I can remember clearly - when we got it we thought we would never run out of space. Obviously HDDs didn’t start at 36 - not even at 16.
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.
I used to love sorting my dad’s rolodex of floppy a disks. He had the 5" floppy b’s and he kept those, “for memories” because no one used them anymore at the time.
He had like 4 floppy rolodex cases.
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.
Happy drive?
You sound like Bob Ross :)Give me the D:!
King’s Quest, Space Quest…
Heros Quest II: so you want to be a hero.
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.
Stretching, not bolding. Look at the p in floppy

Pretty sure the first floppies were 7", but there weren’t in use for very long. But, I would agree with your assessment regarding the two sizes most of us were familiar with.
8", not 7". Apparently, Strategic Air Command was using them to control nuclear weapon launch facilities until surprisingly recently (2019).
Thanks for the correction; admittedly, those were a little before my time, although I did see then once or twice in the wild.
Speaking of storage technology that just won’t die, I think magnetic tape backups still exist in one form or another.
Magnetic tape isn’t obsolete at all. Apparently these days they’re up to LTO-10, which can store 40TB per tape, and it’s also the cheapest storage medium per unit capacity (albeit with an extremely high initial cost for the drive itself). The only reason people forget about it is because it isn’t popular for home use.
just a couple days ago fuji announced they were investing a lot more into tape:
https://www.techspot.com/news/114394-fujifilm-pours-64-million-magnetic-tape-production-ai.html
Shouldn’t data centers be doing reels of data tape then instead of taking all our forms of removable media?
Wouldn’t that make a lot more sense? 40tb reels sound a lot more effective than a 4tb HD. Probably a lot less heat too.
Well, they can only be read linearly so they suck for random-access storage. But they are used in data centers, for backups.
Jokes on you old gods, my blu ray drive is B:






