But it's good to know I have yet another piece of trivia with which to fascinate the young'uns during my declining years …
This Question Will Make You Feel Old
Today in feeling old, through Twitter I came across this question on SuperUser, a Q-and-A site “for computer enthusiasts and power users.” Ready? In Windows you have a C: drive. Everything labeled beyond that is with the following letter. So your second drive is D:, your DVD is E: and if you put in a…
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They'll be more blown away by what was required to take a photo.
But if A: is a floppy drive, what letter is the tape drive?
Tape drive didn't mount with a drive letter.
And I feel even older because I stared out with 8″ &, the new guy in town, the 5 1/4″, drives. Of course I also remember 5 mb storage units the size of washing machines.
Ah, yes — 8″ floppies. Remember those from a Xerox dedicated word processors. Good times.
Ah. I only had one on my Commodore VIC-20.
Here are some instructions to manually update to MS-DOS 5.0. Microsoft is no longer updating these instructions.
http://smallbusiness.support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/73257
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Back up all of your current files.
Insert the Microsoft MS-DOS 5 Upgrade Disk 1 in drive A and type the following command:
a: setup /f
This creates a set of bootable MS-DOS 5.0 floppy disks (the procedure requires seven 5.25-inch disks or four 3.5-inch disks).
Start the machine with the Startup disk (5.25 inch) or Startup/Support disk (3.5 inch). Check to ensure that all partitions can be accessed and the machine is working correctly.
If repartitioning is desired, now is the time to use the MS-DOS 5.0 FDISK command. Insert the disk that contains FDISK.EXE (5.25-inch Startup disk; 3.5-inch Startup/Support disk), type FDISK, and follow the instructions. After you run FDISK, run FORMAT.
If you can access all drives, insert the floppy disk that contains SYS.COM (5.25-inch Startup disk; 3.5-inch Startup/Support disk) into drive A and type SYS C:. This program makes the C: drive boot MS-DOS 5.0.
Create an OLDDOS directory and copy all of the files from your current DOS directory to the OLDDOS directory. Then, delete your old MS-DOS files in the DOS directory. For example:
MD C:OLDDOS
COPY C:DOS. C:OLDDOS.
ERASE C:DOS
Copy the MS-DOS 5.0 files from the bootable floppy disks to the DOS directory on your hard drive. For example:
COPY A:*.* C:DOS.
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If you are using Windows, additional steps need to be performed.
That question didn't make me feel old, it made me feel brilliant, because I knew the answer in spite of being a Mac guy.
+John E. Bredehoft Excellent. I'm copying that into a WordPerfect doc to send to my Epson 9-pin dot matrix printer for future reference. Thanks!
+David Newman We'll start asking questions from my SE/30 days next.