Source
dweaver987•

My first computer only had an a:\ drive. It wasn’t until six months later I bought a 40 MB(not a typo) spinning hard dry and got my c:\

6
Reapr•

My first HD was 20MB, I wanted bigger, but encountered 2 problems

  1. They didn't make any bigger
  2. MS-DOS 2.3 (I think) only supported HD's up to 20MB

Later on you could get bigger HD's but had to partition them if you wanted to use them in DOS

I thought it was Ok because nobody would ever be able to fill up a 20MB hard drive - that's like the whole library of congress!

5
po8•

I have a 5MB hard drive in my back room somewhere

3
internet-handle-1985•

A was always the floppy, but I never knew why there was never a B.

2
po8•

B: was the other floppy drive. Having two drives let you easily copy floppies in the era where there was no hard disk and precious little RAM. The alternative was a bunch of floppy swaps for a single disk copy.

My first machine had 48K of RAM, 16K of ROM, and two 128K 8" Shugart floppy drives

4
internet-handle-1985•

So the drive designations date back to the 80s, then? The only computers I ever used from that era were my school's old Apple II machines, and those drives were numbered.

2
Reapr•

Yeh, basically they started with a single floppy drive. This would load your OS on starting up - then you could remove it and put in a different floppy for whatever program/game you wanted to run.

Once you exited the program, it needed to load the OS again, so it would give you the message "Please insert Disk with COMMAND.COM" - So you had to put your OS disk in again.

Then you got PC's with two floppy drives, A and B. You left your OS disk in the A drive, so that you can run programs from the B drive, no more disk swapping - it was glorious!.

So when HD's came out - they were naturally labelled as Drive C

EDIT: I remember having to fiddle with the BIOS settings to tell it to boot from drive C now and not Drive A - and for a while the default was to try and boot from drive A first, and if unsuccessful, boot from C

5
displaced_virginianOlder than the British Invasion•

I've used dual floppy PCs (actual IBMs), but I didn't own one.

2
[deleted]•

Floppy's...thats why.

1
non_clever_username•

Then later D: and E: were your two CD drives, the source and the writer. F: was your Zip drive…I think that was it.

1
Chicken-n-Waffles•

If you had your onboard IDE channels full, that was C,D,E,F. I had a Jaz and that was SCSI so I had a G drive as well and had the ability to chain 6 more devices.

1
BiggestNizzy•

It was DH0: in my day.

1