<story><title>What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for?</title><url>http://superuser.com/questions/231273/what-are-the-windows-a-and-b-drives-used-for/231278</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>acegopher</author><text>I used an Xacto knife to create an extra notch in Commodore 64 5.25&amp;quot; disks back in the day so that I could take the single-sided disks and make them double-sided.&lt;p&gt;I would take one disk flipped over the other, mark the notch with a permanent marker, then cut out the outline. Most disks, like Elephant Memory, would work fine. You just flipped the disk over and inserted back into the 1541 to read the reverse side.</text></item><item><author>danieldk</author><text>Even worse was illegal software. There were 720KB (Double Density) and 1440KB (High Density) 3.5&amp;quot; diskettes (amongst other sizes). The disk drive would detect the difference by an extra hole in the disk.&lt;p&gt;People would buy cheaper double density disks, drill a hole in it, so that the same diskette could be used as a 1440KB disk. Of course, they were of a far lower quality, and &amp;#x27;arj&amp;#x27; (which was popular at the time) would often fail after the n-th disk.&lt;p&gt;Edit: heh, there is even a reference to drilling holes on the Apple website ;): &lt;a href=&quot;http://support.apple.com/kb/TA39910&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;support.apple.com&amp;#x2F;kb&amp;#x2F;TA39910&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>unistdh</author><text>Wow. What would happen if one of those floppies were damaged or unreadable? Would the whole process be a waste of time?</text></item><item><author>300bps</author><text>Novell Netware 2.15 came on 49 360k floppies.  I remember generating individualized network clients based on the chipset of your network interface card with SHGEN-1 and SHGEN-2.  To this day I have no idea why the last disk it asked for was SHGEN-2 and then it said, &amp;quot;Your shell is now on SHGEN-1.&amp;quot;</text></item><item><author>rayiner</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s funny to talk about the 20 year old hackers who didn&amp;#x27;t ever have the experience of installing Word Perfect 5.x from 30-40 floppies, but let me tell you that those kids are going to feel just as old pretty soon. My daughter, who is about to turn one, is puzzled by why my Macbook Air doesn&amp;#x27;t do anything when she touches the screen. She doesn&amp;#x27;t recognize my dad&amp;#x27;s old Treo, which he gave her as a toy, as a phone, but will put a thin slab block up to her ear. We don&amp;#x27;t have cable at home, so she watches all her shows on Netflix and iTunes.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nasalgoat</author><text>I had a special square cutter tool specifically designed for this purpose.  Just slot the disk in the tool, punch, done.&lt;p&gt;It helped when you were putting out hundreds of disks of pirated games on a regular basis.</text></comment>
<story><title>What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for?</title><url>http://superuser.com/questions/231273/what-are-the-windows-a-and-b-drives-used-for/231278</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>acegopher</author><text>I used an Xacto knife to create an extra notch in Commodore 64 5.25&amp;quot; disks back in the day so that I could take the single-sided disks and make them double-sided.&lt;p&gt;I would take one disk flipped over the other, mark the notch with a permanent marker, then cut out the outline. Most disks, like Elephant Memory, would work fine. You just flipped the disk over and inserted back into the 1541 to read the reverse side.</text></item><item><author>danieldk</author><text>Even worse was illegal software. There were 720KB (Double Density) and 1440KB (High Density) 3.5&amp;quot; diskettes (amongst other sizes). The disk drive would detect the difference by an extra hole in the disk.&lt;p&gt;People would buy cheaper double density disks, drill a hole in it, so that the same diskette could be used as a 1440KB disk. Of course, they were of a far lower quality, and &amp;#x27;arj&amp;#x27; (which was popular at the time) would often fail after the n-th disk.&lt;p&gt;Edit: heh, there is even a reference to drilling holes on the Apple website ;): &lt;a href=&quot;http://support.apple.com/kb/TA39910&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;support.apple.com&amp;#x2F;kb&amp;#x2F;TA39910&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>unistdh</author><text>Wow. What would happen if one of those floppies were damaged or unreadable? Would the whole process be a waste of time?</text></item><item><author>300bps</author><text>Novell Netware 2.15 came on 49 360k floppies.  I remember generating individualized network clients based on the chipset of your network interface card with SHGEN-1 and SHGEN-2.  To this day I have no idea why the last disk it asked for was SHGEN-2 and then it said, &amp;quot;Your shell is now on SHGEN-1.&amp;quot;</text></item><item><author>rayiner</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s funny to talk about the 20 year old hackers who didn&amp;#x27;t ever have the experience of installing Word Perfect 5.x from 30-40 floppies, but let me tell you that those kids are going to feel just as old pretty soon. My daughter, who is about to turn one, is puzzled by why my Macbook Air doesn&amp;#x27;t do anything when she touches the screen. She doesn&amp;#x27;t recognize my dad&amp;#x27;s old Treo, which he gave her as a toy, as a phone, but will put a thin slab block up to her ear. We don&amp;#x27;t have cable at home, so she watches all her shows on Netflix and iTunes.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>honestcoyote</author><text>I did the same. And disks were a bit expensive to a kid like me, so I&amp;#x27;d even do the cut on various game disks I had, since many of them were single side only, and it was like getting a free disk.</text></comment>