Oh bless you and your youngsterness. A and B, by convention, were reserved for floppy drives and C was typically the first hard drive.

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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.

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dmurray 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't recall this, and I do recall running something like "diskcopy A: A:" to do that operation.

	▲	pxx an hour ago \| parent [-]
		phantom drive B is explicitly mentioned in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive_letter_assignment#Order_... the linked source checks out. diskcopy will also do this for you if you give it source = dest.

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HPsquared 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Hard drives were a luxury.

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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.

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actionfromafar 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Many clones came without a HDD.

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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.

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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.

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nopechief 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]