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

True - and prior to THAT there were the Altair and the Imsai 8080 using the
8080 chip. Input on the IMSAI was via 16 paddle switches on the front.
Output was via the LED's - 16 of them. You input and read data two bytes at
a time. BTW, those 160k floppy's were 8" discs. I developed the firmware for
the first double density controller - got a whopping 320k out of an 8"
floppy.

"Bob I" <birelan@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:OlSD6x2yGHA.3440@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Try this

http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa031599.htm

"The first IBM PC ran on a 4.77 MHz Intel 8088 microprocessor. The PC came
equipped with 16 kilobytes of memory, expandable to 256k. The PC came with
one or two 160k floppy disk drives and an optional color monitor."



Eric wrote:

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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