cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/62743547
We still pay homage to the old gods with the “save” icon
Fun fact: that’s why we call them icons.
They are trying to change those icons now, too. People dont recognize them so they use others.
I haven’t seen that, any examples?
I don’t why they’d change that either, just because they don’t know the origin, they still grew up knowing it meant “save.”
I remember seeing a program that used something else once, and when I worked in web apps and websites, there was always a debate about what to use.
A common one is a folder icon (or a tray) with a download arrow… DESPITE it being used to save locally. Same thing with a cloud with a down arrow.
Some other programs used to use the icon for a hard disk, the three circular platters.
If I remember the app, Ill give better examples of programs that use other things.
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 use B: for my BluRay drive. Seemed appropriate.
We won’t talk about what ray the A: drive is.
Eh, that sounds like a fun idea to me. I think it’d be nostalgic. I’m gonna look into that, actually :)
‘Dances with ribbons of mainframe tape’
Rise ye old ones RISE
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:
/
is that on /dev/sda ?
Maybe, though we stopped using that about a decade ago, I use UUID’s now to identify devices.
i feel like all three replies to my comment got wooshed. guess i have to make the joke more obvious next time…
But they were, all of them, deceived, for another drive was made.
Yeah /dev/sda
I found out about an unlimited drive that big tech doesn’t want you to know about, it’s called /dev/null
It’s amazing how much you can store in /dev/null
I think Sam Altman doesn’t want you to know about /dev/shm
/dev/shm is antiquated and inefficient. It’s now recommended to use /dev/datacenter
It’s a Windows convention, but, if you are old enough, it was a DOS convention and a CP/M convention.
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.
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 used a floppy disk yesterday. In some businesses we use old equipment for a long time. Because it works.
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.
Easy. At some point between then and now.
And the CD-ROM drive was D:
It was called “D” for “disk”, duh.
(The above comment for legal purposes is a joke.)
*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.
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 got you, OP…
C:\DOS
C:\DOS\RUN
RUN\DOS\RUN
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.
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?
Ha ha, wow. Good times 🙂
My first computer was Tandy. 8088 chip, I think. Orange monochrome monitor. No hard drive, 2x 5.25 floppers.
That sounds just like my first PC! I bought it secondhand in 1983 or 84. It was fancy because most monitors were green, and the two floppies meant you didn’t have to remove the program disk to save a file. I remember laboriously typing out the code for Eliza, the first chatbot. I had a daisy wheel printer too - the paper was fan-fold and had sprocket holes down the sides.
That’s awesome. I remember those printers. Perforated strips everywhere. Businesses had the green and white striped kind.
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.
A CD drive but no hard disk?
I don’t know of a DOS/Windows that would accept such a thing.edit: nonsense
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.
You’re totally right. You could put DOS on one floppy and the driver on the other or just load it into RAM.
I never did it - by the time I had an optical drive, I had hard drives - but I kinda wish I had such a system. So wild to have like 500 times the data on a CD (much less DVD) than the floppied you booted from! lol.
Imagine the chaos if you could write to multi-writable CDs, too. lol. THat would have been wild.
But what of the fabled and cursed other, D: drive?
In my mind it will always and forever be the CD-ROM drive, but any drive added to a standard Windows system (including partitions) will just continue the alphabet from C. So if you install a second hard drive (or partition your only one) it will become D, the next one will be E, and so on:
I’ll leave it to someone else to convey this in a biblical fashion.
CD? Ohh those the weird disco frisbees that ruined audio vibes!
/s
Fabled? It’s perfectly ordinary. I see the D drive all the time. At home it used to be an HDD to store things that didn’t need the speed of the SSD (media, documents, etc), and now it’s where USB drives end up on my work laptop.
There were times when a Windows reinstall would name the system drive E: instead of C:, usually if one tried to reinstall without reformatting. That was truly, horribly cursed.
