Directories? On a floppy?
Remember floppies? Not much point in having a lot of directories; just get another floppy (And label it, and put it in one of those boxes…). We don’t bother with that any more. Directories make sense. They even look like little folders. That is today, but back in the ‘DOS Days’ they were pretty mysterious to me.
So how did I learn about them? They’re kind of abstract. Reading about them in a book and not having any use for them, just doesn’t cut it. The motivation is not there and this is too complicated. I never had any formal training on the subject. Then along came John Madden Football for the PC. Yes, it ran on floppies and if you wanted to load different teams or create your own playbooks, you had to know which directory to go to. So that’s what they’re for! Now I need to learn the cd.. , mdir, and embrace the back-slash. That’s the one that gets confused with the forward-slash (Not to be discovered until the internet thanks to those UNIX folks.).
The game had somewhat of a graphical interface to move around and load things. I wanted to copy a playbook and them make changes. This really brought out the coach in me. Each play had it’s own file. I could copy the file and tweek it for another play. No way was I going to build the play from scratch. The programmer/lazy computer user part of me just had to find better/more efficient ways.
Once hard drives became more common, this whole directoy & sub-directory thing made perfect sense to me. After all, I had John Madden Football on floppies.
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