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.

[–] naoseiquemsou@kbin.social 2 points 2 years ago

The unix/linux root directories are also good examples, perhaps dating even earlier.

[–] TimeSquirrel@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago (2 children)

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 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years 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 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years 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.

[–] argv_minus_one@beehaw.org 1 points 2 years ago

Drive letters in general are a legacy holdover from MS-DOS. The Windows NT kernel doesn't use them. It is a user-space DLL that maps the kernel's single tree into drive letters.

All other operating systems use a single tree with mount points instead. Windows supports mount points as well, but its default behavior is to assign a drive letter.

Drive letters are still useful, though, if you have multiple drives and

they're removable drives (optical disc drives, USB drives, etc), or
they're internal, but you want to keep them separate (i.e. not RAID).

Other platforms deal with this by reserving a subtree for mount points (/media on Linux, /Volumes on macOS), which is functionally equivalent to drive letters. This does have the advantage that mounted volumes are identified by a name rather than just a single letter, but on the other hand, the path to the mounted volume is longer and less convenient to type.