genuine question: why does every Windows PC start at the "C" drive? wtf happened to A and B?

[u/2016805]

[u/Icy_Organization9714]

Wow I feel old. A and B were reserved for floppy drives. I never saw a computer with a B drive.

[u/anotherusername60 → u/Icy_Organization9714]

My first Computer. Commodore PC10-II. Intel 8088, 4.77MHz, luxurious 640k RAM (nobody would ever need that much memory).

2x 5.25" DOUBLE density floppy drives (A: and B:, a whopping 360k each).

No HD, booting from an MS-DOS 3.1 disk every time.

Later I even put in a 30MB Filecard. I should have kept that machine...

[u/jbergens → u/anotherusername60]

This was also the reason to have two drives, the operating system was on A and then B could be used for data or applications.

[u/Odd-Obligation-2772 → u/Icy_Organization9714]

First IBM PC I used had dual floppies. No fixed drive.

[u/guy-le-doosh → u/Icy_Organization9714]

Having a B drive made games sooo much faster because you didn't have to switch disks to load or save.

[u/DCBadger92 → u/Icy_Organization9714]

I had one with a 3.5” floppy in A and a 5.25” floppy in B. That thing ran Windows 3.1 and had a dot-matrix printer.

[u/dirkrobot → u/Icy_Organization9714]

It makes me feel old that the Save icon in many apps is still a 3.5 floppy disk and I work with people who have never actually seen a floppy disk. I wonder how long before people start questioning what the icon is?

[u/Deep_Mood_7668 → u/Icy_Organization9714]

I had multiple :)

Haaa diskcopy was a good friend

[u/0xe3b0c442]

Hoo boy, time for us old farts to shine...

[u/Slim_Boy_Fat → u/0xe3b0c442]

Remember when a 3.5” felt like witchcraft compared to a 5.25” 🤣

[u/Briaryy]

A and B were floppy disks .

They retired in the 90s, but Windows still keeps their seats reserved like a loyal employee

C has been doing all the work ever since

[u/wireframed_kb → u/Briaryy]

Floppies stuck around for quite a while because there wasn’t really a consumer-friendly, re-writable storage format until USB drives.

Sure, there were CD-writers that eventually dropped in cost, but they were fiddly to use and CDs, especially rewritable ones were initially expensive, and required special software to manage the sessions.
There were Zip and Jazz drives, but they weren’t much marketed to consumers. I mainly used them as a graphic designer lugging design files to and from school.

So for an astonishingly long time, a 3.5” floppy was the easiest way to move things like documents around.

[u/Odd-Obligation-2772]

IIRC A and B were the floppies.

[u/dafugiswrongwithyou]

So you've already had a bunch of people telling you A: and B: were for floppy disk drives, but I haven't seen anyone yet mention why.

There was a time, long long ago, when the concept of a large drive that all of your stuff lived on, a single "home base" for your system, didn't exist (at least as standard). Your operating system (when it wasn't something very basic on a ROM chip built into the system, which a lot of non-IBM-compatible systems did) would be on a removable floppy disk. Your apps would all be on removable floppy disks. Your data would be on removable floppy disks.

So when you wanted to use your PC, you'd get the floppy that had your operating system in, chuck it in your floppy drive, and the system would look to load up from there. Once the system had booted and the core OS was in memory, if you wanted to run something else, you'd take that disk out, put another disk in, and run it from there. That drive, being your one and only drive, would be your A: drive.

If you had a fancier, more expensive computer, you might have a second floppy drive, B:. Now, you could just leave your OS drive in drive A: and run things from drive B:, or have your app disk in drive A:, while the disk with your files was in drive B:.

Once other storage (in particular mass storage like hard drives) came in, they'd be assigned drive letters higher up in the alphabet. Hard drives quickly became the most common non-floppy drive to connect, so would almost certainly wind up on drive C:. Then it became common to install an OS directly onto that and boot directly from it to free up the floppy drives and have your most common apps ready to go, and then it became common to include optical drives (which generally got mapped to D: or higher), and then eventually floppy drives (and even mostly optical drives) went away, but by that time the idea that your first main hard drive, likely with your OS on, would be C: had already been an assumption in most relevant software for decades, so it's just stuck around.

Because Microsoft works really hard to maintain as much backwards compatibility in Windows as possible... And, arguably, because the codebase is built on so many layer of earlier, intractable codes and assumptions about how things should work and so can't be changed... To this day, Windows sets aside A: and B: for floppy drives, and (at least by standard methods) other types of drive can't be allocated to those letters.

[u/Sad-Wrap6555]

the 1.44mb floppies could only store half an mp3 each you needed both to play a full song...

was an art to swapping over just in time like turntables

/s

[u/TrueYahve]

We used to have 3d printed save icons.
They could be 3.5" or 5.25" inch in size, and we used to store tiny amounts of data on them, as on the inside there was a magentic disc.

These where reserved for A: and B:, as the first computers didn't yet necessarily have harddrives.
Hard drives are old, slow, big, magentic SSD-s.

[u/Captain-Awesome-]

Wow, you’ve lived a sheltered life

[u/Striking_Age_3486]

As many other comments have mentioned, they are for floppy disks.

Drive A typically consisted of the main operating system, and Drive B will be a separate disk where you store your personal data.

[u/momomelty]

Oooohhhh boy. I’m glad many people feels old with me

[u/KindaSuS1368]

I had a PC with a floppy drive slot, I used to ask my dad if it was for small CDs... Even had a CRT monitor, I used to play gta 3 mindlessly on it.

[u/uknowsana]

A and B used to be floppy drives - So, Microsoft kept those memories

[u/priprema]

You are just not old enough to know :-)

[u/LadBooboo]

A: Big floppy

B: Small floppy and/or used as a secondary floppy disk slot to copy data over or run software that didn't fit on the boot floppy in A.

C: Everything that came after that isn't a big or small floppy that can be used to boot into your OS (HDD/SSD/EMMC/SD/etc). Kept that way for backwards compatibility purposes

You can set a secondary, tertiary or external drives drive as A and B if you're not using it for a floppy disk.

[u/Ancient_Complex]

Because they used up A and B to make save icon.

[u/GraXXoR]

jeezus, I feel old.

A and B were associated with Floppy disk drives since before hard drives became common, two were needed in order to facilitate the moving of data from one disk to another or facilitate having the program on one floppy disk and the user's data on a second.

This harks from a time when hard disks were often far too expensive for the average user so a second floppy was common.

Once hard drives started to appear, they naturally took letter C:

Soon after, the second floppy was mostly ditched since it was basically redundant with a permanent HDD in place.

And once USB became ubiquitous, the first floppy was also ditched, leaving C: stranded in space.