Re: Why is the Hard Drive called "C" by default?

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You call that historical? How old are you? You know there were floppy
disks before 5 1/4" disks?

Anyway, yes A and B were used for floppy drives. As of about 10 years ago,
all computers came with 3.5" drives, many with 2 3.5" drives for easy
copying of one floppy disk to another, and they were starting to get CD
drives at the same time. So the CD drives ended up being called E or F if
you had 2 hard drives. Now that we can write to CDs and even DVDs, we don't
really use 3.5" disks anymore. So hard drives still start at C, CD drives
still start at E/F, and A and B are generally not used in new computers.

"Og" <Og@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:uViDyHzyGHA.4232@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
<ComputerTechGeek@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1156830082.806488.44860@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Is there a historical/technical reason why the Hard Drive called "C" by
default? Why is it not called "A" (since it is the primary mass storage
device on many computer configurations)? What about the "B" drive? Just
curious about this.....

Thanks in advance

Short answer: Historical
Long answer: The first Personal Computers had a single floppy drive (Drive
"A").
Users booted from a floppy disk, popped that disk out and inserted a
floppy disk which contained the computer program that the user desired to
use.
Some people wanted to keep their data on a floppy disk "other" than the
"program" disk. They grew tired of the "floppy disk shuffle" and put a
second floppy drive into their computers, ("Drive "B").
Well after hard disks became ubiquitous in PCs, the floppy disk began
transitioning from size 5 1/4" to size 3 1/2" . For several years during
that transition phase, many people required a floppy drive of each size in
order to access older programs/data on the old size disks and their new
programs on the new size disks.
Steve



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