On Tue, 29 Mar 2016 21:02:58 +0100, John Rumm
wrote:

snip

You
can use *nix style grafting of volumes into another directory tree if
you like.

And I would say, outside the admin / geek, few would want to. ;-)

It can help if you have quite a few partitions, and then also things
like multi format card readers that can gobble letters.

Oh indeed, I've seen that. However, I still stand by my suggestion
that few people are bothered by them. They are just another thing they
don't really understand but work their way round.

Just in the same way they don't know the taskbar from the desktop or
the desktop from their browser home page. ;-)

You can end up
with more than 26 logical drives!

;-)


Of all the platforms I have used, I think I liked the Amiga way of doing
drives and volumes the best[1]. You could create physical device names
as you liked (either defined in a mountlist file, or as a separate mount
listette file in the Drivers folder). You could also create an
assignment that looked like a device name or volume name, but pointed
somewhere else like a folder on a hard drive or network.

I just turned mine on and played games on them. ;-)

You could refer to a drive by its name (say dh0: for a hard drive) or by
its volume label (say system. If you used the volume label it did not
care what physical drive it was in. So it made handling of removable
media very nice - you could refer to MyCDName:somepath/somefile and if
it could not find the volume it just promoted you to put it into any
drive (which could include copying the CD to a hard drive folder and
then assigning that name to the folder).

I sort of follow that. 'Very flexible'.

It still bugs me today when
installing a multi DVD game for example that Windows will frequently
insist that you stick all the discs one by one into the same drive, and
can't make use of multiple DVD drives...

I'm not sure that's 'Windows' as such but the installer routine? ITRW,
how many people have more than one optical drive (or even one working
optical drive for that matter)?

I was just given a couple of bags of 'computer stuff' by my BIL that
he was about to throw out and thought he had better check with me
first (as I have always built their PC's and still support one PC and
several laptops).

I've just given him back the current motherboard box back with the
user manual, the blanking panels for the front of the case and
expansion slots, driver CD and an Ethernet cable (as I said they
should keep at least one handy for testing etc).

Some of the rest I'll keep (other Ethernet cables and a gaming
joystick) but the parallel printer, firewire cables and a couple of
dial-up modems and some other odd stuff will probably go in the
electrical gadgets recycling skip.

[1] to be fair ISTR VMS could do similar, but the syntax was convoluted.

K.

Cheers, T i m

p.s. I've just given Mum one of our old sofas for her lean-to and she
currently has it up on some 100mm blocks to help get up and out of it.
I took two of the 20mm high 'feet' off it today and intend to (3d)
print some 120mm high replacements. ;-)