On Fri, 19 Oct 2018 11:26:54 -0400, nospam
wrote:

In article , Eric Stevens
wrote:

Macs don;t have obscure C drives, or D drives they ahve names and
can
be
given any name just loke you'd name a child.

I have C and D, also known as System and User. That naming system
predates both Mac and Dos.

that's not a naming system.

I named them. That's been my naming system for most of the last 30
years.

no. you chose a drive letter based on convention and physical port.
that's *not* a name, nor can you have two of the same letter.

Wrong again. Windows named the drives C and D. I nmaed them System and
Userdisc.

not 30 years ago, you didn't, ...

Not then I didn't, not those names.

you said predates dos, which sets the time frame.

There was a period of time when my machines only had a single drive
(e.g. Wyse AT) and there was no need to identify separate drives.

... but despite that, it's nowhere near as
flexible or as powerful as disk naming on a mac.

Even if you are correct, that's not the point at issue.

it is correct and it absolutely is the point.

macs were designed to be friendly and easy to use, without the
restrictions imposed by previous systems.

floppy disks, later hard drives, could have whatever name the user
wanted, even with the *same* name, and could also be changed at any
time without breaking anything, including when files were open. the
reason is that classic mac os did not rely on path names. the os didn't
care what disks (or folders) were named.

for example, a mac would ask for a floppy by name if it wasn't the one
in the drive. for servers, it would auto-mount them by name, requesting
login credentials if needed.

deviating from that convention causes all sorts of problems, especially
windows, which assumes c: is the boot drive.

Which is why I didn't change it.

so you didn't name it.

I never claimed I assigned the drive letters. I *named* the discs (or
more strictly the partitions). See above.

not before windows let you do that, and if you move the drive to
another system, the name doesn't always move with it.

I don't know. I have never tried. But I do know that on the Cromemco
the name was written to the disc and travelled with it between
machines.

move the c: drive to another computer in an external enclosure. it's no
longer c:, as that other computer has its own c: drive. so much for the
name you supposedly gave it.

the mac was the first computer to let the user name disks anything they
wanted.

Not quite so. I was doing it with discs for my Cromemco back about ther
time the Apple][ was emerging. I seem to recall that Unix required
volume names almost from the outset.

you recall wrong, and cromemco was not a mass market computer anyway.

BSD Unix (1970s) certainly did require volume naming and my
recollection is that it inherited it from the AT&T version.

assigned by sysadmins, not end users, and mounted in the file system
where end users don't even realize it's a different physical hard
drive.

Who cares who assigned it? Could the ordinary user assign or reassign
names on Mac discs?

that made sense for a multi-user system with sysadmins, but not a
personal computer, one with multiple removable hard drives, floppies,
usb sticks, etc.
--

Regards,

Eric Stevens