• AnonTwo@kbin.social
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    5
    ·
    1 year ago

    I dunno why, I like how floppy disks look

    I’d be perfectly fine with floppy disks still if they had been able to remotely keep up with CD-DVD in speed and size.

    But also isn’t Modern Computing basically built upon an entire foundation of 30+ year old structures? I mean not just the Floppy Icon but on Windows A:\ is a reserved letter for the Floppy Drive, and that was a legacy from DOS.

    • TimeSquirrel@kbin.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      Also, you cannot create a file named “con” in Windows, even in the latest versions. It’s a holdover from DOS where that word was reserved for the console. For example, you could type “copy con file.txt” to quickly create a text file from the command line and start entering text.

      • dan@upvote.au
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        There’s another interesting fact here: MS-DOS 1.0 didn’t have directories… To print a text file, you could just do TYPE foo.txt > LPT1, since LPT1 wasn’t in a directory (like /dev on Linux).

        MS-DOS 2.0 added directories. However, to remain backwards compatible with 1.0, devices were still “global”. You could still run TYPE foo.txt > LPT1 regardless of which directory you were in.

        This is why you can’t create files names CON, LPT1, etc. in Windows. They’re reserved globally, which is a holdover from the original MS-DOS version from 1983.

      • argv_minus_one@beehaw.org
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        You actually can, if you bypass some translation. \\?\C:\CON is a perfectly valid file path…and creating a file at that path will prevent almost all software from opening it! You can see it in File Explorer, but you can’t delete it without a command prompt.