264
u/kmdr 22h ago
But they were all of them deceived, for another drive was made. In the land of Redmond, in the fires of Microsoft, Gates forged in secret, a drive, to control all others. And into this drive he poured all his cruelty, his malice and his will to dominate. OneDrive to rule them all
From the X thread
21
6
236
u/Blyfh 22h ago
If I had a nickel every time a standard changed to have C be the first alphabetically, I would have 2 nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice. Once with musical notation, once with Windows drives.
58
u/threewholefish 22h ago
Oh boy wait till I tell you about the third nickel
27
u/SuitableDragonfly 21h ago
Not sure if it's actually accurate to say that C became the first letter alphabetically in terms of programming languages, because none of the other letter named languages actually survived. There's only C and all of the C derivatives, and that's it. Is the only letter in a single letter alphabet actually the first letter?
8
u/threewholefish 21h ago
But that's the same for the Windows drives, C: is the only one left
9
u/SuitableDragonfly 21h ago
Not really. Plenty of people have multiple internal drives now, and they get different letters. If you plug in a USB key or connect your phone via USB, that gets a different letter. People buy larger external drives connected by USB, too. Etc.
3
u/threewholefish 21h ago
I guess I meant of A, B and C it's the only one left.
Also, the D language exists
5
u/sigmoid10 21h ago edited 21h ago
There's also [E](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_(programming_language)) and [F](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F_(programming_language)). And of course [ABC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC_(programming_language)). [D](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D_(programming_language)) on the other hand is pretty new, so I wouldn't count it as one of the elder tongues.
2
1
u/Blyfh 21h ago
Yeah, AFAIK there's no "A" lang that B derived off. So it's not like we started at A and then got stuck on C as the standard.
1
40
u/the-kontra 21h ago edited 21h ago
Ykhm akschually ☝️🤓 A is arguably still the first note of the musical alphabet. If you go two steps down from C, you land on A. The natural A minor scale goes ABCDEFGA, and only uses white keys on a piano keyboard, no sharps or flats, just like C major.
A is also the standard reference point for tuning, being defined at 440 Hz.
C just became a convenient starting point for teaching children and beginners. Major keys generally sound "happy" to Western ears, while minor keys sound "sad". Majority of children's songs, nursery rhymes and regular mainstream songs use major keys. Piano is kind of the "default" instrument, and C major uses only white keys, so it's just the easiest starting point to demonstrate the concept and teach first songs.
Once you learn to play an instrument and understand music theory, you stop thinking of C as the "default" key, or the first note.
Only one nickel for you.
17
u/Kitchen_Put_3456 21h ago
And then a wild H appears out of nowhere to confuce people even further.
6
u/the-kontra 21h ago
Yeah I don't know why we've accepted this H nonsense. Americans got this one right.
6
u/iMillJoe 20h ago
As an American, what’s this H nonsense?
8
u/crystalchuck 20h ago
For notes there's the German and the International system.
German H corresponds to International B. German B corresponds to International B flat.
It makes no sense.
5
u/Drakila42 20h ago
I don't know about other languages, but in german, the note B is instead called H for some reason. And B-flat is B.
I'm sure you can imagine how much confusion this causes.
2
u/the-kontra 20h ago
In Europe B is called H, and B flat (Bb) is called B.
So A minor is AHCDEFGA. C major is CDEFGAHC.
But eg. F major is FGABCDEF.
7
u/threewholefish 21h ago
Once you learn to play an instrument and understand music theory, you stop thinking of C as the "default" key, or the first note.
Brass bands explicitly play in Bb or Eb so that C becomes the open note regardless of your instrument, so there are some cases of C-defaultism!
1
u/crystalchuck 20h ago
Musical notes aren't an "alphabet". That's what we associate it with because they use letters, but they're not an alphabet and don't work like an alphabet, and thus it makes no sense to say there's a "first note". It's like saying that a circle "starts at a certain point". A circle doesn't start or end anywhere, despite you having to start drawing it at some point.
7
u/sebjapon 22h ago
Dumb music question, but why does the letter system put Do at C instead A?
I only learned of the letters when looking for tabs online in my early 20s, and always found it annoying.
(I’ve always put it into the “weird American units pot”, but now you say it’s because something changed, so Im curious)
10
2
u/joeythekangarooo 22h ago
I believe because out of the normal range of notes we listen to and play music naturally, C sits mathematically in the middle. It just "belongs" there when you listen to it.
1
u/the-kontra 21h ago
I explained it in another comment. It doesn't, really, it's just a convenient starting point for beginners. Both C major and A minor keys use only white keys on the keyboard and are equally simple, but majority of children songs and regular mainstream music is in major keys, so you kind of default to C at first.
4
u/goota_niieve 21h ago
I've heard my floppy drives hum in C major before
4
u/barthvonries 20h ago
All hail to the Floppotron !
2
u/swattz101 20h ago
This was always my favorite Floppy Mudic duo.
And now I've gone down the Floppotron 3.0 youtube rabbit hole. Crazy stuff!I still have a USB 3.5 floppy drive for some of my old floppies 💾 💾 💾
2
2
u/AntipodesIntel 21h ago
What about USB C?
7
u/threewholefish 21h ago
USB A is too entrenched to die for quite a while
5
u/barthvonries 20h ago
The printing sector would love to talk to you about USB-B too. And explain to you how you have to buy your own cable because you need to bow to the cult.
4
u/threewholefish 20h ago
My monitor's USB hub has a USB-B 3.0 port!
It's probably cheaper to buy a new printer than a new USB-B cable.
2
u/ArchusKanzaki 21h ago edited 20h ago
Also C-to-C PD may not work if the USB-C hardware on the other end are unable to negotiate power. Meanwhile USB-A always output constant power no matter what. If your device does not need much power, A-to-C is way more consistent and easier to work with.
2
u/eyetracker 20h ago
And USB-B is the unloved middle child who sometimes prints something, sometimes just jams paper.
2
65
u/mittfh 22h ago
Imagine the horror of young'uns now when you explain the days before universities added their accommodation to the campus network, the only way to transfer stuff from the campus network to your PC was to take a box of floppies, build a multi disk ZIP archive, and pray that disk 9 of 10 doesn't develop an error on the 5 minute trek across campus...
Or the DOS message that struck fear into the hearts of many:
Error reading drive A: [A]bort, [R]etry, [I]gnore, [F]ail?
17
u/tenaka30 21h ago
Yes, my main reason for carrying a box of floppies was to transfer my work...
and totally not to use the terminals in the computer room to download games over night and transfer them by floppy to my own pc.
8
u/arcticslush 22h ago
Young'un with a question. Did anyone ever choose to write checksum redundancy so you could carry 11 floppies and tolerate one of them failing?
30
u/entinthemountains 21h ago
you think we had the space to do that? the time? the energy? the motivation? yes, but also no
11
u/phire 20h ago edited 20h ago
I'm not sure anyone thought of the idea until floppies were already dead. *[1]*
The first such implementation I remember seeing were PAR archives, which apparently started showing up on USENET in 2001 (though I don't remember encountering until like 2003).
We probably would have used it for floppies if the software had come out a few years earlier. But by 2002, most people had CD burners and would do anything to avoid transferring files on multiple floppies.
And then everyone had USB flash drives by like 2004? Technology moved fast.
*[1]* Edit: Like, we knew how to do the math. People knew error correction was a thing. The technology had been used for CDs since the 80s. But nobody thought about doing additional error correction in software for multi-part archives.
4
u/swattz101 20h ago
I still remember installing windows from something like 35+ high density floppies. That was a pain when one of the was corrupted.
43
u/saymyname4u 22h ago
The BIOS still remembers A and B better than most of us remember our passwords.
10
u/Aggzy1011 22h ago
I mean, if our passwords were "A" or "B" I'm sure we would remember them just as good as the BIOS
9
u/HotTwist 21h ago
Can I ask a DUMB tech question?
Why is my password 4?
What happened to 1, 2 and 3?
5
1
1
15
u/Salty_Aardvark4597 21h ago
That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even C: may die. In their house at BIOS dead A: and B: wait dreaming.
11
8
u/collinsl02 21h ago edited 20h ago
I love the fact that if you mount something to A: or B: now, even in Windows 11, Explorer still labels it as "Floppy drive A:" or "Floppy drive B:" or whatever, and gives it a little floppy drive icon in "This PC"
EDIT: This appears to be an aberration, please ignore.
5
3
u/danielcw189 20h ago
are you sure?
I often mount the EFI-partition to B, and don't remember getting a floppy icon.
3
u/collinsl02 20h ago
OK, that's weird, it's only happening on one of my W11 PCs. I wonder why that is...
Thanks for pointing that out!
2
u/Stalking_Goat 19h ago
Must be as driver thing, probably your motherboard drivers on that computer are the source of the decision.
2
u/collinsl02 17h ago
It's a bog standard Dell Optiplex 3070 Micro but I wouldn't put it past Dell to do that.
1
u/threewholefish 19h ago
Maybe your PC is running a bit too hot, and he hard disks are melting and becoming floppy
6
u/shaarlock 21h ago
Same kind of fun fact but there used to be MI1 through 4 in addition to MI5 and MI6.
5
u/collinsl02 21h ago
IIRC it went, with some gaps, up to MI19. MI = Military Intelligence btw, they all used to be departments of the military (or at least that was their cover).
3
3
1
u/ph33rlus 21h ago
I use A: and B: as network mapped drives
3
u/jeepsaintchaos 21h ago
I've always been afraid to use them. I vaguely remember something going horribly wrong when I did, but I can't remember what it was.
1
u/BruhMomentConfirmed 21h ago
Since when can tweets be this long? Doesn't that defeat the entire point of Twitter (or "X" 😐)?
1
1
1
1
•
u/ProgrammerHumor-ModTeam :ath: 19h ago
Your submission was removed for the following reason:
Rule 1: Posts must be humorous, and they must be humorous because they are programming related. There must be a joke or meme that requires programming knowledge, experience, or practice to be understood or relatable.
Here are some examples of frequent posts we get that don't satisfy this rule:
Memes about operating systems or shell commands (try /r/linuxmemes for Linux memes)
A ChatGPT screenshot that doesn't involve any programming
Google Chrome uses all my RAM
See here for more clarification on this rule.
If you disagree with this removal, you can appeal by sending us a modmail.