The Blood is The Life 26-04-2012

[miss_s_b]

• Even positive stereotypes can hinder performance, researchers report
  (tags: )
  
• What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for? - Super User
  The fact that someone felt the need to ask this question makes me feel really old.
  (tags: )
  
  

Comments

[lizw]

The fact that someone felt the need to ask this question makes me feel really old.

Gosh, it's been so long that I actually had to stop a moment to remember the answer!

[drunkwriter]

I miss floppies. I find it amusing that they were phased out and within a year everyone was carrying things around on USB sticks. OK, more storage, granted, but... y'know? They weren't broken and didn't need fixing. With software moving increasingly into the cloud, simple 1.44MB floppies would have been a perfect cost-effective way to distribute licenses physically, just enough space for a purchase code and a PDF manual. I've just had a look and even the biggest Word document I've ever written would still fit on one disk. Planned obsolescene is bad enough, but the A: drive wasn't even obsolete.

[bagpuss]

It was obsolete, the smallest pen drive had an order of magnitude more storage than a floppy disk did and took up less space both in the computer and on the person, more useful

A substantial number of pdfs and other documents would not fit into 1.44MB anymore so it wouldn't necessarily work for licenses anyway

[drunkwriter]

*shrug* A substantial number of PDFs and other documents are very badly optimised. At work I receive 300dpi PDF artwork at A4 size and the files are anything from 450KB to 16MB. Sometimes there are reasons for that, but most of the time it's a slapdash supplier.

I still feel floppies went before their time.

[ggreig.livejournal.com]

I know what you mean, but floppy disks were also a very fragile storage medium, prone to physical or electro-magnetic damage. The relief when we were able to start shipping software on CDs rather than floppies was immense, because the number of orders we had to reship suddenly plummetted.

[bagfish]

Just wow. I feel incredibly old now. I never thought people would need to ask what the A and B drives were, shows how far things have come and how long I have been computing.

I think this is a particularly apposite post in the week that the ZX Spectrum turns 30!