Why the FUCK does Windows start its drive letters with C instead of A? It triggers my autism

Why the FUCK does Windows start its drive letters with C instead of A? It triggers my autism.

A is for floppy

:::::depreciated:::::

just stfu man

D E P R E C A T E D as fuck.

Why does every Windows program starts with "this program cannot run in DOS mode"?

I thought floppies died years before even Win 95 came out.

A is for anime drive retard

DOS naming conventions.
A and B were for primary and secondary floppy drives.
C and D were for primary and secondary HDDs.
Other letters were used for other storage mediums (SCSI, serial connection, etc.)

back in the DOS days, A was always the first floppy drive, B was the second floppy drive (if present), and everything from C on was HDD partitions.

D is for optical drive...

They were used pretty much until USB flash drives became affordable. Many people used them well into the 2000's. I remember using floppies to save homework around 2004ish.

Damn, I was four years old in 2004 but never remember seeing them ever.

What's B?

Nothing :D

No, just any IDE device after C. There weren't many optical drives when that convention started appearing.
One of my first computers ran it's optical drive off IDE on the soundcard... They weren't well integrated in the DOS days

Second floppy. People commonly had two drives, especially in the transition period from 5.25' or whatever size the actual floppy ones were.

The original iMac in 1998 was the first mass-market PC to drop the 3.5" floppy drive, and it was pretty controversial at the time, since how the fuck were you supposed to copy and transfer files before cloud storage or even USB thumb drives were a thing?

For a couple years people had to buy $150 external USB floppy drives, even though the things had standard 100Mb Ethernet and 56k modems.

Surely you aren't this dumb for reals

I got one of those for free back in the day. Wish I still had it.
External USB floppy drives were a big thing back in early 2000, my ThinkPad T30 came with one.
Really wish I hadn't sold my T30.

Forgot quote and picture.

Legacy thing.

pls be trolling

my college had those, annoyed the shit out of people since there wasn't really any easy way for students to move files to and from home
i shelled out for an $80, 64MB usb flash drive, got plenty of use outside of school, too

haha, no.

There was also a period in late 90s/early 00s where cheap CD burning was a thing. You'd need to shell out $300+ for a CD-RW drive at the time, but you'd make it back in a few days by selling knock-off albums to family and friends who didn't know how to use computers.

USB thumb drives became widely available by mid naughties, as did the iPod which made CD and CD-RW obsolete. Most people never touched a floppy disk after 2004.

oof. I remember my dad's old zip drive attached to this thing. shit got loud when it was writing iirc

Holy fuck I have fond memories of this POS. The elementary school I attended had these in the computer lab. This were buggy as fuck but they were pretty much the first thing I viewed a website on.

A and B were reserved for 3.5" floppy drives from legacy computers. So when hard drives were added they were C.

Windows hardcodes so much shit to C they can't get rid of drive letters or allow you to change the main system drive letter.
You can't even change registry entries to move program files folders to other drives, because it breaks other windows programs that make assumptions it's always on the system drive.

Windows also jumped from 8 to 10 to avoid parsing for windows 95/98 for old OS detection routines in software.
The newest IE Edge useragent was changed to copy chromes because they finally decided to implement modern features and many user agent string detectors disabled advanced features when IE was detected.

It's a massive mess of legacy and retrofitting. Our DNA is the same way, less than 10% of your DNA is actually used. The real world doesn't stop so you have to keep rolling.

>Our DNA is the same way, less than 10% of your DNA is actually used
That's actually false. Less than 10% of your DNA codes proteins, but the rest of the DNA does things such as regulating which genes activate and when.

Because it's written in C?

One of my old computers I got from work was so fucked up, the C drive was partitioned to be some uefi and only had 100MB. (It was windows xp standard bios though)
When I reinstalled windows xp, it installed to D drive, and when I installed drivers, they all automatically installed to the C drive, no choice.
In the end, I couldn't actually install all the drivers, so I just clean formatted the disk, then reinstalled.

I was going to tell all the young ones to gtfo Sup Forums until they're 18 but I just realized a nigga born as early as 2000 could be on the site legitimately.

I swear I was thinking about this today.

I was about to tell the young ones that name fagging on Sup Forums destroys the level playground for discussion and reinstates a social hierarchy upping the threshold for anons to contribute but then I realized there are a few faggots using a name like Jordan to be that cool guy on the interwebs and newfags totally accept this now.

For me it has been E: for a few years now. No idea how win7 came to this conclusion for the last 3 clean installs but of course it doesn't actually matter how the drives are called.

we had them at mu house around 2007 doubt we used them since then.

This thread explains so much about the current state of Sup Forums.

Nothing. It's like when there was no Windows 9, and no iPhone 9.

Those computers and their keyboards were fucking comfy. That mouse was not comfy. Even today, I don't think Apple understands that a mouse is supposed to be comfy, pic related. If you've ever used it, you know what I'm talking about. The weight practically drags you down and the pointer goes slow even with speed and sensitivity turned all the way up.

It's just a thing man, you'll get over it.

You were retarded if you bought that.

They did. Accidentally that was the last time any real work was put into windows.

What? No they didn't, pretty sure you didn't use a computer at the time. In '95 many people didn't have CD-ROM drives yet, and nobody had CD-R/RW drives, so floppy's were how people moved files around. Very far from dead.

In 2000 I used to buy PC games at the dollar store on 3.5 floppy

underage b&

Floppies were used for BIOS updates far into the 2000s.

>people born in january 2000 can already browse Sup Forums

So apple has always been this shitstain of a scum.
>buy muh proprietary charger every iPhone release
>buy muh earplugs
>buybuybuy this accessory

HOw else would you install it if your computer didn't have a CD Drive?
Office Professional 97 also came on Floppy

>I thought
you should stop thinking

people still used floppies to add SATA/IDE/SCSI controller drivers to be able to even install shit WIndows 2000/XP/Vista and fucking windows 7.

Shit 486 packard hells came with cdrom drives.
And if you tried to install win95 on anything less than a 486dx you were in a world of hurt.
by '97 we had $300 cd-rw's anyway.

I had a Thinkpad 750C that didn't have a CD drive, ran 95 with no issues though.

Calm your autits, I was making a joke

eh, you were being tolerant of the shittiness. I had a 486sx and win95 ran like dog shit.

486DX.
Ran well enough.
I did swap it back down to 3.11 with Calmira though.

I clearly remember bricking my 386 with windows 3.1 floppies. No idea what i was doing. I was 11 and got hold of the disks from a friend. Dad got a new pc for me with win95 and a FUCKING GIGABYTE HDD!

Being this dumb fuck shit without knowledge of history... its not autism user its kokotizm (aka stupid as dick)...

He posted a brainlet Wojak himself to show his lack of knowledge you faggot.

eh, my 486SX-25 laptop with no cd drive ran 95 just fine

Nobody needs more than 26 drives.

Seriously, that A: B: C: shit right there - it has deeply fucked 1B minds, at least.

And all Gates had to do was:

man hier

Shiiiiiiiit.

the hockey puck mouse?
fuck that thing
it also got really dirty inside easier than other mice for some reason

A hier manual page appeared in Version 7 AT&T UNIX.

> Unix versions from Bell Labs were designated by the edition of the user's manual with which they were accompanied. Released in 1979

>>Released in 1979

Then why do SSDs not default to D:

Ha! Gotem!

you can rename them as far as I remember, when you format them before installing the OS

a was the 3.5 floppy
b was the 5.25 floppy
c was the hdd

Because Richard Stallman already had dibs on /

>name drives after letters
>only 26 letters exist

>AKSHUALLY
A: and B: can be any combination of floppies you wish. Many pirates in the 90s were using two floppies for fast copying.

And I swear I even saw a custom rig with one fdd as a source and a jerry rigged stack of six or so drives in parallel as a target.

What happens when you attach more than 26 drives?

It kills one of the drives by random.

they don't get mounted
you will need to mount additional volumes to folders once you reach the limit

Just because some computers came with them does not make cd-roms all that popular. They became standard equipment at the end of the nineties ( 97ish or so ). Before then they were available as a custom "multimedia upgrade" bundled with a sound card and at a major price markup.

of course you could swap the big floppy for a small floppy to do floppy to floppy copies. i was just describing my first pc.

(you)
you do know you can manually change it to A: if you really want to right?

Floppies died frequently in those years, but we didn't have anything else that was widespread and affordable yet so we continued to buy new floppies to replace the bad ones.

Floppies remained common until USB sticks took over in the 2000s. CD-RW put a dent in floppies back in the late 90s but the price was high enough that you expected them to last more than the 5-10 erase cycles you usually got out of them.

huh. I guess it's too bad I was born on march 9 2000

I was born in '98 and even I remember using floppies. I can't believe that someone born just two years later wouldn't remember using them or at least seeing them around the house.

Underage b7

>pic related
I have one of these. I got it for $15 at my local computer shop off the used parts shelf. It's absolute shit, and I wish I had never bought it. It's the model that takes the batteries in the slot on the bottom and it's the worse mouse I ever used. I bought some $10 off brand piece of shit at best buy and it works a thousand times better.

First bytes of any win32 program is a legit dos application that shows that string if run under dos and which is skipped by windows.

they were literally the only affordable and universally compatible option for sneakernet data transfer until USB mass storage became a thing in the early 2000s, and even then people still used them forever

many older applications (and contemporary drivers) also tended to expect to be installed from the A drive, so giving this letter to the system disk was a pointless loss of compatibility with those applications

>They became standard equipment at the end of the nineties
Try 1993/94.

> In anons mind, everyone switched to win95 immedietly.
> nobody pirated the system
> it wasn't preinstalled anywhere

>in anons mind Multimedia pcs didn't exist in the early 90's
>nobody had a cdrom burner in 1997
>Buying acomputer with win95 preinstalled without a cdrom drive

Historically A was for boot floppy, and B was for application/data floppies. Hard drives were not a part of a standard PC setup in the early 80s.

>in user's mind, you need to make up stuff that was not said
>don't be like user

C and D are the third and the fourth floppy

because windows NT is coded in c and not a

In a PC-compatible BIOS, drive #1 and #2 are diskette drives, and drive #3 is the fixed disk. In Windows' naming scheme this corresponds to A, B, and C.

It's alphabetical.
A is a floppy
B is bernoulli drive
C is the C drive
D is disc
E is external storage

N and onward are network storage

>it took this long for someone to give the correct answer
the absolute state of Sup Forums

Dude same

What the fuck? Why would they? They're not treated any different to any other IDE or SATA storage device, so it is perfectly reasonable to go with C: first.

It goes:
>A,B - Floppies
>C+ - First storage device
>D+ + First optical/ZIP/Flash device etc

Not hard user