• JasonDJ@lemmy.zip
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    8 months ago

    Back in my day, /dev/hda was the primary master, hdb was the primary slave, hdc was the secondary master and hdd was the secondary slave.

    Nothing ever changed between reboots. Primary/secondary depended on which port the ribbon cable connected to on the motherboard, and primary/secondary master/slave was configured by a jumper on the drive itself.

      • pascal@lemm.ee
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        8 months ago

        If you had a Sound Blaster 16, you had an extra IDE port on the board, which DOS couldn’t see and you had to load special drivers to use them. Usually it was used for the CD-ROM.

    • rmuk
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      8 months ago

      It always seems fucking wild to me that they chose master/slave rather than, say, first/second, upper/lower, primary/secondary, A/B, whatever.

      “We’re trying to come up with names for two equal devices sharing a single connection.”

      “How about names that wrongly implies that one device is in control of the other while simultaneously evoking the concept of humans as property?”

      “Brilliant!”