Why is the default
drive in MS-Windows computers the C drive? The drives beyond that one are
labelled D, E, and so on. If you plug in USB drives, they get F and G. So yeah,
what about A and B?
Early PCs didn’t
usually come with internal mass-storage devices due to the expense. Instead,
they generally had “floppy” disk reader which used to read 5 1/4″ floppy disks,
initially labeled as “A” in MS-DOS and certain other operating systems. Some
systems came with two such floppy disk drives necessitating the need for a “B”.
When hard disk
drives became standard in most PCs in the later 1980s, since the first two
letters were already commonly used for these floppy drives, they logically
labeled the third storage device “C”. Times changed and eventually, floppy disk
drives were entirely removed from computers, but somehow the label ‘C’ stuck
with hard disk drives. In fact, most Windows computers come with the first
partition labelled as ‘Local Disk C:’ for that same reason.
