Ever wondered what happened to the B:?
I got curious about and decided to solve the Case of the Missing Drive. After a rather short session on Google, I hit upon the answer.
First, a bit of history. When computers were first making waves in the home market, they weren't supplied with native hard drives, as they are today. Instead, they had two floppy drives. Don’t forget, the time am talking about is when 640K of main memory was a luxury. So, back to the point, two floppy drives, A: and B:. While A: usually contained the disk with the OS on it, the second one was used to store other data and files. As technology caught on, hard disks became the de facto standard, having enough and more space to store both the OS and the users' files. Thus, the B: became outdated. The A: survives, as its still the default primary boot device on most systems, and it really helps in diagnostics. And naturally, 'C' would be the first letter that could be assigned to Hard Disk Drives, as A and B were reserved. Though the three coexisted for a while, a second floppy drive wasn’t at all necessary, and B: lost to the other two forever, and the letter B was probably left unused to attribute for its martyrdom and legacy =P.
I got curious about and decided to solve the Case of the Missing Drive. After a rather short session on Google, I hit upon the answer.
First, a bit of history. When computers were first making waves in the home market, they weren't supplied with native hard drives, as they are today. Instead, they had two floppy drives. Don’t forget, the time am talking about is when 640K of main memory was a luxury. So, back to the point, two floppy drives, A: and B:. While A: usually contained the disk with the OS on it, the second one was used to store other data and files. As technology caught on, hard disks became the de facto standard, having enough and more space to store both the OS and the users' files. Thus, the B: became outdated. The A: survives, as its still the default primary boot device on most systems, and it really helps in diagnostics. And naturally, 'C' would be the first letter that could be assigned to Hard Disk Drives, as A and B were reserved. Though the three coexisted for a while, a second floppy drive wasn’t at all necessary, and B: lost to the other two forever, and the letter B was probably left unused to attribute for its martyrdom and legacy =P.
1 comment:
Cool B-) I never wondered abt the fat old B.. awesome info dude!
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