• MrOtingocni@lemmy.world
    4·
    4 hours ago

    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.

    • TerdFerguson@lemmy.caEnglish
      3·
      3 hours ago

      RadioShack Tandy 1000-TX was our first desktop… Technically, I think we had a VIC20 for a couple weeks that was hooked up to our TV but it got returned and damn am I glad we got that IBM-compatible, CGA graphics, loud-ass behemoth.

      I can still hear the sound of the floppy drives intializing on bootup. A: was 3.5" and B: was 5.25" and the way they sounded made my 6-year old self so happy. I used to make the noises myself as it came online.

      Years later, when I write this post, I will think… why did I ever doubt my autism diagnosis?

  • banazir@lemmy.ml
    3·
    4 hours ago

    Ah, Sierra. I played Return to Krondor back in the day, and it’s a great game. Unfortunately, and if I remember correctly, the installer was kind of bugged. See, when you installed the game, it created a Sierra folder in your desired destination folder. But when you uninstalled it, it removed everything in the folder that contained the Sierra folder. I luckily installed it in my Games folder and only lost some games in the process. If you installed the game in to the root of you C drive and then uninstalled it… Well, you were in for a fun evening.

    Thanks Sierra. I’m glad you’re dead.

  • MissingGhost@lemmy.ml
    15·
    8 hours ago

    It’s a Windows convention, but, if you are old enough, it was a DOS convention and a CP/M convention.

  • MehBlah@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    5 hours ago

    Simple A: and B: were reserved for floppies and when hard drives came along C: was the next letter. There now you know…

  • 🌞 Alexander Daychilde 🌞@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    7 hours ago

    You know… someone somewhere MUST have built a system using two floppies and, like, a CD drive or something.

    Also, trivial fact while I’m here that some may not know about: If your system only had one physical floppy, you could still use A: and B:. When you switched, it would prompt you (iirc) to swap the diskettes.

    • jdr@lemmy.ml
      2·
      5 hours ago

      A CD drive but no hard disk? I don’t know of a DOS/Windows that would accept such a thing.

      edit: nonsense

      • 🌞 Alexander Daychilde 🌞@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        6 hours ago

        CD drivers did exist for DOS and you could absolutely boot up a system with one or two floppies, and one optical drive. MSCDEX.EXE was apparently what allowed you to connect to the optical drive.

  • jerakor@startrek.website
    11·
    5 hours ago

    You can only boot from the C Drive these days because a modern BIOS AI has such a small model it can only read at a first grade level. The first commands it understands are C Drive “the discovery command”, C Drive Run “initial boot”, Run Drive Run “OS handover”.