Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => The O' Club => Topic started by: eskimo2 on August 24, 2003, 07:41:25 PM
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Never seen one on a PC or network?
eskimo
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The B drive used to be reserved for a second floppy drive I believe.
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If you install a second floppy drive it will become the "B" drive.
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They used to. The main reason you would have an A and B drive was so you could have your program and bootstrap code on one drive and your data on another. When hard drives became widespread, the need for the B drive switched to mainly copying data between floppies. For the last 10+ years, that need hasn't really existed, so most people don't have two drives.
PS, one very common use of B drives was to have both a 3.5" drive and a 5.25" drive so you could deal with both medias.
Short answer, no real need for it anymore, but the capabillity exists.
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I could be wrong, but isn't the B drive a virtual drive that is used during formatting and installation of the operating system, then deleted?
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Nuke Luper and Chairboy are right. If you open your computer case, you'll find that the cable that attaches to the floppy drive has another connector on it. That's for the B drive.
Back in the good old days, Hard Drives were expensive. The original 8086 PCs very often came equipped with two 5 1/4" inch floppy drives (and those 5 1/4" were sierra-hotel compared to the 8" models). These things were really floppy. Not only was the magnetic media flaccid, they were encased in some sort of cardboard. Write protection usually involved a hulepunch. IIRC, at Single Density, a single DOS 5 1/4" floppy side at single density could hold 160 kb. Of course, you could flip it over. As time went on, you got drives that could read both sides, and you got "double density" disks, bringing it up to the maximum of 640 kb.
When the first mac was released, there hot media on the market were these smaller floppies encased in plastic. The two big competing formats were 3" and 3 1/2". The 3 1/2" won out, and became the standard on Macs, Amigas, and atari sts. Maximum storage was around 720 kb ("double density, double sided")
On the PC front, the 3 1/2 became standard much later, probably around the late 80s. Up until the first pentiums, it was standard to see a PC equipped with both a 5 1/4" and a 3 1/2" drive. And the B drive would often as not be the 3 1/2".
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ahh the ignorance of the young ones :)
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A few corrections. At the time 3.5" DD's (720k) were adapted PC's were using 1.2Mb 5.25" HDs. Eventually PCs switched to 3.5" when 3.5" HDs arrived (1.44Mb). IIRC 5.25" DDs were 360k.
The B: drive served two functions. The obvious one was as the secondary floppy. It wasn't unusual too have two floppy drives in the old days.
The other function was as a 'virtual' floppy so that you could swap disks while copying files setting up stuff. For example, if you wanted to copy a file from one floppy disk to another and only had a single drive system you'd type:
copy a:myfile.txt b:
The system would then read myfile.txt and prompt:
insert b: (or something like that)
You'd then whack in your second disk and it'd write the file.
You could even do copy *.* b: and you'd end up madly swapping between disks (or xcopy *.* b: to save a bit of swapping).
(DOS user since ver 2)
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Ah DOS, the days of little overhead and hours wasted on boot disks.
-SW
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For years, I did not, and would not, OWN a HD. I used my A and B floppies and a RAM drive, no worries.
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I though to copy a floppy on one drive you just used diskcopy...
diskcopy a: a:
SOB
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Ahh yes Vulcan, that's right.
The 5 1/4 " DD was around 300 (you sure 360 and not 320?), but you could have stuff on both sides. But IIRC the 5 1/2"ers with dual heads (double sided) were HDs.
The real **** of the 5 1/4" world was the commodore 64 disk drive. S-L-O-W.
Do you what I really loved? The way those macintoshes would get in those endless swap loops. (Please Insert Disk Labelled A. You insert disk labelled A. Please Insert Disk Labelled B. You insert disk labelled B. Please Insert Disk Labelled A. You go looking for the paperclip. Then the damn thing yells at you for turning it off.)
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Soon they'll be asking "Why don't computers have "A" drives?"
Dell has already stopped shipping them as standard equipment.
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Mac's beat em' to it....don't think they've had 3.5's inawhile
B: drive ... last i had was combo 3.5 / 5¼ it burned out, haven't had one since ...
Bring's back memories of the real 'floppy' disk .... the 5¼
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Originally posted by Dinger
Do you what I really loved? The way those macintoshes would get in those endless swap loops. (Please Insert Disk Labelled A. You insert disk labelled A. Please Insert Disk Labelled B. You insert disk labelled B. Please Insert Disk Labelled A. You go looking for the paperclip. Then the damn thing yells at you for turning it off.)
rof!
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blimey, been a while since I've seen a 720k disk.
I mean like.....crap man, days of my youth. First real computer I ever saw was a dedicated word processor called a Scantext 950, it had no HDD and took 12" disks.
(http://image1ex.villagephotos.com/extern/640697.jpg)
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My computer has a B: drive.
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Vulcan is correct. Here was the size migrations starting with 5 1/4 (I would start with the 8 inchers, but I doubt anyone here would remember them :D)
5 1/4 SS SD - 180K
5 1/4 DS SD - 360K
5 1/4 DS DD - 1.2M
3 1/2 DS SD - 720K
3 1/2 DS DD - 1.4M
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newbs... :D
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Originally posted by Skuzzy
Vulcan is correct. Here was the size migrations starting with 5 1/4 (I would start with the 8 inchers, but I doubt anyone here would remember them :D)
na ... used one 3 years ago do configure an IBM hardware abomination for IBM abominable mainframe.
speaking of a 8 inch
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Originally posted by Skuzzy
Vulcan is correct. Here was the size migrations starting with 5 1/4 (I would start with the 8 inchers, but I doubt anyone here would remember them :D)
5 1/4 SS SD - 180K
5 1/4 DS SD - 360K
5 1/4 DS DD - 1.2M
3 1/2 DS SD - 720K
3 1/2 DS DD - 1.4M
5 1/4 SS SD - 160K
5 1/4 DS SD - 320K
5 1/4 SS DD - 180K
5 1/4 DS DD - 360K
5 1/4 DS HD - 1.2M
AFAIK there were no 5.25" SS HD floppys.
In fact DD 5.25 floppys could be formatted as 80 tracks 9 sectors that gave you 720kb, but you had to use special drivers as 800.com or pu1700.com
IBM delivered OS/2 3.0 "Warp" on 2Mb 3.5" floppys. I spent two nights making all 23 disks from image files, 5 out of 10 floppys right out of a new sealed box couldn't be formatted to 2Mb....
Damn, just looked at my "pet cemetary", found an old XT with an old SS SD IBM floppy, the one that was double-height and had a "jaw"...
I still can assemble an XT in 10 minutes right from the trashcan... I never waste any computer iron. We have some very expencive devices here, bought in the 80s, that are comtrolled by old DOS PCs, and the software doesn't run on modern fast computers (people who programmed in Borland compilers in early 90s know what I mean), so I sometimes have to find spare parts for that rusty boxes.
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Originally posted by Boroda
We have some very expencive devices here, bought in the 80s, that are comtrolled by old DOS PCs, and the software doesn't run on modern fast computers.
Is this the system that powers the Russian missile defense network?
(http://image1ex.villagephotos.com/extern/640697.jpg)
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"B" drive is now a CDR -RW
many "A" drives are too
my 1.44 floppy is slower than my cd burner
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Originally posted by Swoop
Is this the system that powers the Russian missile defense network?
Missile defence uses our own Elbrus series supercomputers.
We (Chemical Physics Institute, Russian Academy of Science) are stuck with dull tasks like complex chemical reactions, biochemical processes and stuff like life prolongation etc. Funny things like nuclear weapons development are in another branch of this institute, and the guys working on it sit in another place behind steel doors and armed guards... :( ;)
The stuff I was talking about is nuclear magnetic resonance devices and other big complicated machinery. Besides this old monsters we have some other stuff to work with like cluster calculating systems on gigabit backbone network... Unfortunately, we can't get proper service for our three Convex supercomputers, so our scientists have to use IBM-compatibles in clusters.
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B drive..
reminds me of 5.1/2 disks
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And may I just add: Whoosh.....splat!
(http://image1ex.villagephotos.com/extern/640697.jpg)
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Originally posted by Skuzzy
Vulcan is correct. Here was the size migrations starting with 5 1/4 (I would start with the 8 inchers, but I doubt anyone here would remember them :D)
I've seen them, but never used them. I think by the time I had seen them, they were already on the endangered species list.
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Well, since we got the way back machine runnin'.
(http://www.inettek.com/stuff/punchcard.jpg)
How many bytes one those cards hold? :D
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5.25" floppies? Aieee... I have 12 5.12" floppy drives...please, take them! ;)
We can't just put computers on the curb anymore...hazmat or something.
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Anyone remember the casette drive for the Commodor Vic 20?
It was completely manual.You had to keep a listing of where every program was on the casette and you'd fast forward to where the program was the load it.
I didn't care, I was 8 or 9 at the time, and could play all the games I wanted to.
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had cassette tapes for the c64 to...
i have over 100 360k 5/14 inch disks for my c64...
i cant see why they would start discontinuing the 3.5 floppy
there a hell of a lot easier than cd-r's and there the only thing you can use to transfer old games to your 86-486
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Originally posted by pugg666
Anyone remember the casette drive for the Commodor Vic 20?
It was completely manual.You had to keep a listing of where every program was on the casette and you'd fast forward to where the program was the load it.
I didn't care, I was 8 or 9 at the time, and could play all the games I wanted to.
I had a tape drive system for my Atari 400 and one game on tape: Star Trek. It weighed in at about 34K and took a long time to load.
Most of what I did back then was program in BASIC, and later a derivative of Pascal called Action! which was totally unreliable as a programming language. But I had a means of storing my work and that was key.
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I had an Atari 400 with tape drive also. Took 10 minutes to load Zaxxon.
Took up collecting old computers a few years ago, have most model atari and commodore machines now.
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paperweights :)
and yeah, I remember this huge-ass floppies that didn't hold squat..
and the IBM cards.. aaaakkk. . remember getting one out of order ?
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to the untrained eye it looks like 64 bytes
Yeah, my first computer was a 1979 pet with a cassette deck. Ahh yes...
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10 print "Hortlund is cool"
20 goto 10
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Eskimo, I can see you are not an old timer:D
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Actually Dinger, the punch card held 80bytes of program/data and,.12 bytes for offset information. There were several formats of the punch card over the years, based on which CPU was being loaded.
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Originally posted by Hortlund
10 print "Hortlund is cool"
20 goto 10
I could be wrong....
10 print "hortlund is a dweeb";
20 goto 10
I *think* that makes it fill the screen horizontally too (maybe comma? dunno)
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Originally posted by LePaul
I could be wrong....
10 print "hortlund is a dweeb";
20 goto 10
I *think* that makes it fill the screen horizontally too (maybe comma? dunno)
I bet you guys were filling the screens with your name on those computers sold at department stores 20+ years ago. ;)
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I had a cassette drive for my TI-99/4A until Santa brought me the expansion box which came with a 5.25 disk drive and an extra 32K of RAM! That box weighed a ton and I was convinced it was built for military use. I think my poor parents (I mean Santa) paid $500 for it.
Unfortunately the interface cable from the CPU to the expansion box was about as think as my shoe.
(http://oldcomputers.net/pics/ti994asystem.JPG)
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I remember my first programming attempts on the C64...
I had bought this book where you had a program listed, all you had to do was copy everything. Maybe it was 1500-2000 lines or something like that. The one I chose was "sub commander"
Anyway, I spent most of the day writing all those lines. I cant remember right now how old I was...maybe 10... after a while I realized that there were lots of characters that I didnt know how to type, namely [ and ] so instead I used { and } (or maybe it was ( and ) ...not sure).
Well, as you would suspect the program didnt work at all. Turned out the book I had bought was for the vic20 "computer" and not the C64.
Oh well...I suppose thats why I turned to law instead of computers at the uni...
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commodore basic:
; = do not append carriage return
, = append tab
Oh yeah
and
rem "^H^H^H
or something like that would allow you to do funky effects with comments while listing. My favorite trick in computer science when they were teaching us to do stuff like sorts would be to write some 2 line program that faked the results in a really fast time, followed by an END, then put a rem afterwards that would make the preceding lines disappear when a general LIST was given, followed by the textbook solution.
The result?
Wow! you got it to bubblesort 1,000 elements in .01 seconds?
Sure, take a look for yourself :)
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Commodore 64.... memories, I can still remember the reset code "SYS64738" !!
(http://www.old-computers.com/museum/photos/commodore_c64.jpg)
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now that is a portable computer ! lol
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Sad to say, but my first computer courses taught were using punch cards as SOTA.
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Would it be better if data CDs and audio CDs today are cased in a 5.25" like those old floppy drives? We dont have to worry about scratching them by accident.
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Originally posted by Ike 2K#
Would it be better if data CDs and audio CDs today are cased in a 5.25" like those old floppy drives? We dont have to worry about scratching them by accident.
Why? Any exposed portion is exposed to the danger of being scratched. The plastic is hard enough to withstand a fair amount of punishment and barring a scratch in the recording material itself, almost any scratch can be repaired.
Typical wear and tear can be buffed out, and I hear that deep scratches can be filled with a clear polymer and fixed measurably enough to burn a copy.
Floppies were different in that a scratch actually damaged the recording media.
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When I ditched my 5.25" collection, I had over 2000 floppies.
The dangers of owning a Copy II PC Option board ;)
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Skuzzy,
As we progress behind the monitor, our floppy has grow smaller and smaller. Was a time when a man did a days work, and his floppy was 8". Then, with less physical work it was reduced to 5 1/4". Now a person goes to work, hangs around his cubicle, takes a long lunch, and leaves the office early, and his floppy is now 3 1/2". (Sigh) Soon, rumor has it, the floppy will be removed. :p
Thorns
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LOL Thorns.
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Real men use tape.
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Originally posted by AKIron
I bet you guys were filling the screens with your name on those computers sold at department stores 20+ years ago. ;)
Yep :)
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Originally posted by Ike 2K#
Would it be better if data CDs and audio CDs today are cased in a 5.25" like those old floppy drives? We dont have to worry about scratching them by accident.
(http://members.aol.com/naa60512/case2)
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As an interesting fact in the newest OS from Microsoft Windows Server 2003 they are bringing the "B" drive back. It is selectable in the drive letter selection area so you will be able to set drives to use it.