Why is C the main drive?

[zzuupp]

The first drives were floppy drives

This

 

[Ichinisan]

ha, i had that exact same puter. i couldnt remember what it was called though.
had a few game carts for it.

Looks just like my old TI-BASIC. I had the tape drive too.

 

[Ichinisan]

I've tried installing Windows to a drive with a letter other than C: and regretted it. Some poorly-made software just assumes your HDD is drive C:

I remember that NVIDIA drivers kept trying to extract to a slow, 32MB thumbdrive (which happened to have the letter C: ) without enough capacity and the system would be frozen for a long time until it errored out.

 

[bobdole369]

A: was the first and only drive, though sometimes you had a B: It wasn't until dos 4+ Well really 3.3 where people actually had hard drives.

 

[FoBoT]

The Unix filesystem concept is so much better it's ridiculous.

and white spaces in paths is evil
http://thc.org/root/phun/unmaintain.html

 

[masteryoda34]

The Unix filesystem concept is so much better it's ridiculous.

Here lies the real answer. Microsoft must design its systems to be arbitrarily different from everyone else so that it wouldn't become too easy for customers to switch OS.

 

[Perknose]

A: 5 1/2"
B: 3 1/2"
C: Hard



Wait, wat?

People had dual 5 1/4" (not 1/2) drives before 3 1/2" drives ever existed.

Of course, there were 8" floppy drives for the mainframes before either. Those disks truly were floppy (which even the 5 1/4's weren't), which is how floppies got their name, if you were wondering.

You weren't? Well, then, get off my lawn! Whippersnappers! We had to walk 10 miles through the snow, uphill both ways, just to get to the break room.

 

[ViRGE]

The Unix filesystem concept is so much better it's ridiculous.

I have to disagree. The only thing they got right was the /home directory and using forward slashes instead of backslashes. Otherwise between spreading binaries between /bin, /sbin, /usr, and the nonsensical mount points, it's a pain in the butt to navigate. Apple and MS did a heck of a lot better here.

 

[silverpig]

I have to disagree. The only thing they got right was the /home directory and using forward slashes instead of backslashes. Otherwise between spreading binaries between /bin, /sbin, /usr, and the nonsensical mount points, it's a pain in the butt to navigate. Apple and MS did a heck of a lot better here.

It makes sense to have system binaries separated from user binaries separated from root user binaries.

MS does this too. That's why explorer.exe is in C:\windows or C:\windows\system32 or whatever, and the user programs go into C:\Program Files\

What nonsensical mount points? You can mount anything anywhere you want. You can run your entire system on a 64 GB SSD, but have /home be a 2TB hard drive for all your media files if you want.

I can move from system to system and keep the file structure the same. Media is always in /media, regardless of whether it is a desktop or a laptop or if I have 8 hard drives in softraid as a big media store, or an smb share, or with just a few files. No worrying about whether media is in D: or E:

 

[tokie]

cd /drivename

should be the standard going forward. So many things need to die in Windows but M$ is afraid to just cut the compatibility cord like Apple did with OS X.

I thought the WinXP virtualization tool in Win7 would lead to this happening for Win8, but nope. I'm actually concerned it is never going to happen since they are writing ARM in for Win8.

 

[Jodell88]

I have to disagree. The only thing they got right was the /home directory and using forward slashes instead of backslashes. Otherwise between spreading binaries between /bin, /sbin, /usr, and the nonsensical mount points, it's a pain in the butt to navigate. Apple and MS did a heck of a lot better here.

There's a bit of a stir lately with Fedora thinking about merging these into a single path.

 

[IronWing]

With each iteration of Windows, MS keeps trying to isolate users further from the physical drives. "Your default file space will now be a virtual 'library'." In doing so, MS has created needless complexity.

 

[gophins72]

People had dual 5 1/4" (not 1/2) drives before 3 1/2" drives ever existed.

Of course, there were 8" floppy drives for the mainframes before either. Those disks truly were floppy (which even the 5 1/4's weren't), which is how floppies got their name, if you were wondering.

You weren't? Well, then, get off my lawn! Whippersnappers! We had to walk 10 miles through the snow, uphill both ways, just to get to the break room.

waaay back when...i used to *dream* of having just a single 5 1/4" drive, heh.

 

[Exterous]

So many things need to die in Windows but M$ is afraid to just cut the compatibility cord like Apple did with OS X.

With good reason - MS has to be very carefull with changes or the masses will rise up in revolt and heresay will ruin a product. IE vista (IT wasn't great but it wasn't nearly as bad as people made it out to be)

 

[DrPizza]

Back in the days of Dos, I was offered a job in an accounting department for after I graduated (with a degree in Engineering) because I debugged a program written for Symphony - the program was written for a D drive, but installed on a C drive. The programmer who was flown in to our location couldn't figure out the problem.

A, B, C,... just a relic.

 

[VinylxScratches]

/mnt/* > Drive letters

 

[ThatsABigOne]

The Unix filesystem concept is so much better it's ridiculous.

Just recently got into Linux scene with Debian, CentOS, and Ubuntu, and I know what you are talking about. :thumbsup:

 

[AMCRambler]

Originally, pc's didn't have hard drives. You booted from a dos boot disk and ran all your programs off of floppy disks. My family's first computer was a PC Jr. No hard drive. Boot from dos disk, then swap that for Pacman, a:\Pacman.exe FTW!

 

[zinfamous]

simply because it was chosen to be.

Had you been whatisface that originally developed DOS, you could have made it q, or something.

 

[Ichinisan]

simply because it was chosen to be.

Had you been whatisface that originally developed DOS, you could have made it q, or something.

Not really. I was going to explain it earlier, but then saw it has already been covered in this thread.

Computers had dual floppy disk drives (A: and B: ) before they had internal hard disk drives. Poorly-coded software still assumes your HDD is C:, so you break compatibility by changing this.

 

[Red Squirrel]

The Unix filesystem concept is so much better it's ridiculous.

I agree as well. I so wish corporate environments were unix/linux based. So much easier to manage.

And I guess it makes sense now, so floppies came before hard drives, so A and B were taken for them, so then the hard drive just became C.

I tried to go over 26 letters once. Was not pretty. Weird errors and stuff. :biggrin:

 

[Lifted]

I agree as well. I so wish corporate environments were unix/linux based. So much easier to manage.

And I guess it makes sense now, so floppies came before hard drives, so A and B were taken for them, so then the hard drive just became C.

I tried to go over 26 letters once. Was not pretty. Weird errors and stuff. :biggrin:

And I'm still wondering why you lot think mounting a file system, and an actual file system, are the same thing.

BTW, Windows can mount drives to directories.

Can *nix mount drives to letters?

:awe:

 

[zanejohnson]

it's the standard, windows is built around it...

 

[manly]

Here lies the real answer. Microsoft must design its systems to be arbitrarily different from everyone else so that it wouldn't become too easy for customers to switch OS.

"Not invented here" syndrome afflicts a lot of tech giants, but I don't think this explains drive letters. Not only did Microsoft purchase the original QDOS from a Seattle-area developer, but if I'm not mistaken drive letters were already established in CP/M.

 

[CZroe]

Actual answer:
Every X86 motherboard chipset still has a floppy drive controller. They come as a pair, operating off of a single cable/controller. You can't set a floppy to be something else, thus, A: and B: are reserved.

DOS was nothing more than a Disk Operating System that required you to boot a DOS disk and then point or switch to a program or data disk. Having a second floppy drive reduced the need to physically switch them and was standard until fixed hard disk drives became standard.