On 29/03/2016 21:02, John Rumm wrote:
On 28/03/2016 16:54, T i m wrote:
On Mon, 28 Mar 2016 15:54:04 +0100, John Rumm
wrote:

On 27/03/2016 23:26, Tim Streater wrote:
In article , John
Rumm wrote:

On 26/03/2016 09:33, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

Once again the legacy of Windows - a single user system with its
roots
back in floppy disks - and Unix - a multi-user system designed to
work
with a very busy disk from the outset - show up.

You do talk a load of crap at times...

Windows 3.1, sure a shell on top of DOS. Win NT onward, basically a
re-engineering of VMS. Hardly what anyone would describe as a single
use floppy based system.

Bodged downwards though to have drive letters. Drive letters, in this
day and age.

Drive letters are crap,

Strange though, in 20+ years supporting many Windows users, I can't
remember anyone (other than a *nix / Apple user) even mentioning, let
alone complaining about them? I mean, they may not understand what
they represent in a technical sense but they generally understand what
they mean to them (in most cases without any instruction).

although using them is (mostly) optional...

Quite.

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. 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.

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). 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...

Windows didn't care about having multiple CD drives, the crummy
installers some people used did.
Some of the installers would do exactly as you said and find the disks
in other drives.
The installers were not a part of windows and came with the application.

Some still do although most now use the inbuilt windows tools.

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