| ▲ | kijin 6 hours ago |
| I remember when A and B were commonly used drive letters. C was a luxury. D was outright bourgeois. But for some reason, drive letters starting with C feel completely natural, too. Maybe it's because C is also the first note in the most widely known musical scale. We can totally afford to waste two drive letters at the start, right? |
|
| ▲ | urbandw311er 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Oh bless you and your youngsterness. A and B, by convention, were reserved for floppy drives and C was typically the first hard drive. |
| |
| ▲ | keitmo 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | On systems with a single floppy, drives A: and B: were two logical drives mapped to the same physical drive. This enabled you to (tediously) copy files from one diskette to another. | | |
| ▲ | dmurray 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I don't recall this, and I do recall running something like "diskcopy A: A:" to do that operation. | | |
| |
| ▲ | HPsquared 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Hard drives were a luxury. | | |
| ▲ | prerok 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | While original IBM PCs indeed may not have had HDDs, it did become a standard for PC XT, as early as 1983. Only the cheapest version were without a HDD by the end of the 1980s. | | |
| ▲ | actionfromafar 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Many clones came without a HDD. | | |
| ▲ | prerok 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Sure, I can imagine that. My first contact with PCs was in 1988 and they all had HDDs and were definitely not "IBM PC" but clones. That said, that's just my experience so YMMV. | | |
| ▲ | pdonis 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | My first PC, bought in late 1986, was a Leading Edge Model D, with two 360K floppy drives and no hard drive. I wrote a script to put COMMAND.COM and some other key files on a RAM disk on boot so I didn't have to keep the DOS floppy in the A: drive all the time. IIRC they had come out with a model that had a 20 MB hard drive but it was more than I could afford. MIT, where I was at school then, had some IBM PC XTs with 10 MB hard drives, but most of their computer resources were time-sharing DEC VAX machines. You could go to one of several computer labs to get on a terminal, or even dial into them--I did the latter from my PC (the one above) using a 2400 baud modem, which was fast for the time. |
|
| |
| ▲ | layer8 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | By the end of the 1980s, a lot of years had passed, and you’d buy an AT instead of an XT. |
|
| |
| ▲ | nopechief 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [dead] |
|
|
| ▲ | euroderf 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| D was typically a CD-ROM drive. So when CD-ROMs went the way of the dinosaurs, where did D go ? Is it always some kind of SYS drive nowadays ? |
| |
| ▲ | tom_ 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It's just whatever happens to end up there? That's why D was typically the CD-ROM: A was the first floppy drive, B the (typically absent) second floppy drive, C the only hard disk, and then D was the next free letter. On my laptop, D is the SD card slot. On my desktop, it's the 2nd SSD. | | |
| ▲ | xoxxala 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | When recordable CDs were brand new, we set up a station at work with two hard drives (C: and D:) and the CD burner (E:). Naturally, the CDR burning software was hard-coded for D: but didn't mention that anywhere (including the error message). Took us a few hours to figure it out. | |
| ▲ | hilbert42 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | "That's why D was typically the CD-ROM:" We used to set our machines so the CD-ROM was always drive L. This way we always had 'room' to add HDs so there was no gap in the alphabetical sequence. Drive D - data drive, E - swapfile, etc. Test and external drives (being temporary) were assigned letters further down than L. Sticking reasonably rigidly to this nomenclature avoided stuff-up such as cloning an empty drive onto one with data on it (cloning was a frequent activity). Incidentally, this rule applied to all machines, a laptop with HD would have C drive and L as the CD-ROM. Machines with multiple CD-ROMs would be assigned L, M and so on. |
| |
| ▲ | Kwpolska 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Depends on your setup. These days, I have a D drive for sharing data with the Linux install I never use. I used to have a D drive for user data (to keep them safe when reinstalling Windows) back in the 9x/XP days (and my CD drive was E). I also use the drive letter assignment feature, so my external USB drive is always drive X. | |
| ▲ | tetha 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | On servers, D is commonly used to push data / vendor installations / other stuff you may want to backup separate from the OS off of the main OS drive C. | |
| ▲ | rzzzt 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | C: is the boot partition with the DoubleSpace driver, D: is the compressed volume. | | | |
| ▲ | kijin 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | D usually refers to the second internal storage device these days. Either a second SSD, a large HDD, or an extra partition in your system disk. If you don't have any of those, a USB stick might get the D drive temporarily. |
|
