223: Filesystem: Drive Letters, Mounting, And Paths. Part 1.

How are filesystem organized with multiple drives? Now that you know why you should learn how to use a filesystem in your programming, what do you need to know? Programming with a filesystem is different than just using your computer to open and close files. You need to understand how a filesystem works in even more details in order to include this ability in your programs. Depending on what you’re programming, you might need to know quite a bit. Even a simple program will expose you to error handling and exceptions, security, favorite locations, common dialogs, and much more. Listen to the full episode or read the full transcript below to learn more about some of the reasons that helped define how filesystems worked. Transcript Now that you know why you should learn how to use a filesystem in your programming, what do you need to know? Programming with a filesystem is different than just using your computer to open and close files. You might think you already know how to use a filesystem. It’s kinda hard to use a computer without knowing this. But you need to understand how a filesystem works in even more details in order to include this ability in your programs. Depending on what you’re programming, you might need to know quite a bit. Even a simple program will expose you to error handling and exceptions, security, favorite locations, common dialogs, and much more. I’ll be explaining how to use a filesystem in this series in your code. The operating systems will be Windows, Linux, and Mac. This is based a lot on my experience through the years which has mostly been on Windows with a bit of Linux. I first started using a Mac about 9 years ago so don’t have much experience with early Apple operating systems. My explanation might be a bit tilted in favor of what I know about most. In many ways, a Linux filesystem and a Mac filesystem are similar. They might look different to you as you use the computer but this gets back to the differences between using a computer vs. programming a computer. Windows filesystems are very different while Linux and Mac are more closely aligned. Before Windows came along, IBM and Microsoft worked together to create an operating system for personal computers. Back then, using disk drives of any kind was still new. Personal hard drives were very rare. I didn’t get my first hard drive until probably a year after I got my first computer. Even then, it was unreliable and would overheat. I had to keep it outside of my computer with the cables running through the back of the computer. And I pointed a small fan at the hard drive to help keep it cool. The whole setup looked like a mess but it mostly worked. It was possible back then to use a computer without inserting any floppy disk or running any operating system. When the computer started, it would look for a disk and if none was found, then it would start running a BASIC interpreter. BASIC is a programming language where you give each line a number and then you can refer to other places in your code by using the line numbers. It was possible to turn on a computer, type in a few lines of code, and print your name over and over on the screen. Maybe you could even use some colors assuming the monitor was a color monitor. Many monitors back then used a black screen with green text. That’s all. When color monitors came out, they were still limited to about 16 colors. But at least the normal text was then white on a black screen. The computer could display 25 lines and 40 columns of text on the monitor. I remember when I was even younger and my family got an Apple II computer. I don’t really consider this part of my computer experience because all I really did on the computer was practice some typing. Yes, I taught myself how to type which is probably why to this day, I still have to look at the keyboard in order to type properly. It always amazes me when I talk to another programmer and they turn their head to