'C' drive

[Bunches]

Why is a 'C' drive called a 'C' drive and why did the 'B' drive come before the 'A' drive?

[Ethel]

Early home computers did not have a hard disk.

They had two floppy disc drives only - A and B.

They booted from the A drive and ran applications from the B drive.

Then came the hard drive - it had to be C.

The first hard drive computers had the small floppy drive as A, and the large floppy disc drive as B.

[rojash]

Even machine which only have a single floppy drive have both A and B drives. The B drive is a virtual floppy drive which allowed you to make a copy fo a disk, so you could type Copy A:*.* B: and the machine would read the contents of the floppy disk to be copied, then say "Put the destination disk in Drive B:" which was in actual fact the same drive. After inserting a disk the machine would then write out the contents just as if it was writing to a different drive.

I'm not sure what you mean by "why did the 'B' drive come before the 'A' drive?" - it didn't.

Incidentally it wasn't only home machines that didn't have hard drives - business machines often had only one or two floppy drives as well. The first hard drive I ever installed was 5 Megabytes (!) and cost just under �3,000.