989
Ancient traditions
(sh.itjust.works)
not me with my
/dev/sda
/dev/sdA
Fun thing, when you attach a USB floppy drive on a modern Windows 11 system, it'll dutifully give it drive letter A: and even has a floppy drive icon. (Which admittedly doesn't look like a floppy drive. At all. But it has a floppy!)
And why yes, I've seen it a time or two in recent years, because I've been archiving some stuff. Imaging shitloads of old floppies.
Yeah and if you put a second one it's B:. At least on my slowly dying 7 machine.
Every Windows is built on every generation before it. All sorts of legacy stuff is hidden and embedded inside that still works that's useless. Dialer.exe still runs from the Run cmd. Com/LPT1 stuff should still be there for old printers.
I personally don't have the heart to say any of the legacy support stuff is completely useless. I mean, yeah, Windows has support for floppy drives (through standard USB mass storage), but you know what? I can image old floppies through it. If Windows recognises floppy drives and gives it drive letter A, that's not that much of bloat really, just an entry in a list or something.
And also most Linux distributions also have ancient-ass legacy stuff, though admittedly usually you need to specifically install it and maybe even hack a bit to get it to work again. ...why yes, I am going to do physical terminal stuff one day, 1980s style, and I'll be very mad if I need to hack serial getty support in the hard way!
To be fair, you occasionally need to "hack" Linux a bit to get modern stuff working, too
I had A: and B: back in the days.
Oh yeah, that reminds me of that time SO's PC had C: for the OS and D: for data and wanted to format it, so i booted it to DOS (i think it was still win 98 SE) and happily formatted C: only to discover that in DOS i was actually formatting D:... fun times.
My disk was a floppy until you walked by. Now it's solid state.
Brrrrr ck
Cachk-cachk
Nrrrrrrrrrr
Yeah i can hear that drive letter 35 years after the fact
Sorry, been busy
Stuff to do.
B is the real grandpa
If you're not setting emojis as your drive letters, you're living in the past.
Incidentally, don't open the 😳: drive
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My first PC is still in storage. It had
- A: 3.5 floppy
- B: 5.25 floppy
- C: HDD
- D: CD-RW
- E: ZIP drive
ZIP drives were a game changer at the time. We had no other (fast) way to move larger amounts of data in one shot without compressing / archiving over multiple disks.
Last year I dug a couple hundred zip disks out of my parents attic and bought an old zip drive off eBay so I could read them. They all still worked. My old data got moved to the cloud and the zip discs + drive went back to the attic. Perhaps in another 20 years I'll dig it out again if we still have USB ports on our systems haha.
Anyways, the USB thumb drive business killed iomega overnight.
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I miss floppies. Putting them in and taking them out was so satisfying. Remember when you had to install stuff with like a hundred of them? The ker-chicks and that smooth sliding feel as the sheath slid open....
Theme Park came on 8 floppies, was my first game.
If Rollercoaster Tycoon was more of a tycoon/business game...
I try to play it on occasion out of nostalgia, but it has so much jank! Haha
Ahhh yes. Sitting there drinking tea and flippin' floppies for half an hour or even longer. And there was always that one that would read well.
I had reason to use an optical drive lately, and even that was a blast from the past. Hitting eject, watching the light blink and then the drawer opens. USB-based storage just isn't the same.
I regularly use optical drives for the movies. Why should I pay twice the price to "buy" some movie from Apple or Google? I rather wait 2 days for the mailman to deliver me a Blu-ray that doesn't only have better quality, but also keeps working when some company decides to stop licensing the stuff I purportedly "bought". Second-hand discs sometimes cost as much as 1€.
But well, I might be a bit old school, as I just got a few new vinyls delivered to me the other day.
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I was adding a second drive to a Windows desktop the other day and was tempted to assign it A:. I just couldn't do it, though. It felt like I was violating some unspoken rule.
Knowing Windows there's some legacy piece of code that checks if there's a floppy in drive A: and assigning a drive to it makes the OS fail to boot or something.
Some dumbass at my workplace assigned a network folder to D:, and made it a department standard (along with 20 other network folders assigned their own drive letters) and so now you can't access external drives if you restart the computer with one plugged in.
Because windows assigns D:\ to the flash drive before user initialization, and then overwrites it with the network drive when they log in, which breaks both for that session.
..………. Fuck.
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It's a code of honour at this point .... no one uses A: in respect for all those drives that died for our sins
About 15 years ago there was a company I did some work for (I was at an MSP at the time) who wanted to virtualize certain systems. Great. No problem. Except those systems needed to read floppies. Ok, I can pass it through. Except they wanted to get away from floppies. Great, let's get you a newer system from a different vendor because this one went out of business when NT4 was still the big dog. Nope, too much money and the process would change.
So I had to reregister every DLL by hand because the installation didn't work on Server 2008 r2. And every few months it would have to be done again because one of the guys thought himself a genius and kept messing up the janky ass workflow we put together to download info from thumb drives to a virtual floppy.
So plug in the drive, janky ass script creates a virtual floppy in drive A of the server, and manually (eventually I just wrote a script because I didn't want to get that call on a Saturday) register each DLL every so often. And they'd rather pay the company I worked for several hundred dollars a month than pay a couple of grand one time that would have paid for itself in less than a year.
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Of course I know him, he's me!
/dev/sda1
I set my memory card reader to the letter A, but I also have my old Lightscribe DVD drive (and looking for one optical drive for my ThinkPad), and have a few floppy drives put away for potential hobby projects.
i still kinda like the big floppy design. It just looks like it means business.
THIS IS THE SHIT! GIMME A HELL YEAH! THE FUTURE IS HERRE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I think I still have a few 3 1/2" and even 5 1/4" around here somewhere. I even had a 120mb Superdisk drive. I bought it used and got 4 or 5 years of use from it. It could hold 1000's of CNC programs and even CAD drawings.
***Great Googlely Moogely! You can still get Super disks on eBay!
When I'm on Windows, I use subst A: %USERPROFILE%\GitHub to mount my local repos as drive A for shorter paths.
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I just realized I had forgotten about drive letters altogether.
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this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2025
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