computer drives

[potterfan3]

What happens when you have more than 26 drives on your computer? you would run out of letters. and what happened to B:\? was it used when computer had tape drives?

[vehelpfulguy]

What happened to B drive ?.

Well believe it or not, the first PCs did not have ANY hard drives at all. They had two diskette drives.

You had to run the PC from DOS on a diskette (A drive).

If you need to run an application or save some data you needed to put another diskette in, so this went in another diskette slot, which was the B drive.

When the first hard drives were included they became the C drive, as some computers still had 2 diskette drives (A and B).

[fo3nix]

yea; A is 3.5" floppy, B was 5.5" floppy (afaik), and C was and is hard drive (usually). B never got replaced though.

As for the more hard drives question, I'm not sure. But I think you'd find it hard to reach 26 separate drives, unless you had several partitioned drives in use.

[kempie]

The original IBM PC from 1981 did use tape for storage but this method was almost immediately superseded by floppy disks (which was an optional extra).

A and B (if fitted) would have both been 5.25" floppy drives.

1983 saw the introduction of a hard disk.

3.5" diskettes are a more recent(!) technology, their first arrival being in 1986.

[tomd]

Linux devices don't use A:, B:, C:, - hda1, hda2 for hard disks, and cd1, cd2, etc for cd-rom drives etc.

I've never seen more than 26 on a system but I don't see why how there would be a problem in that environment. (Hardware elements aside)