I am sure that you have noticed more than once when you enter your computer, that the main hard drive that you access says C:, and that if you add another it will continue with D: and so on. But then… why is there no A or B?
Today we are going to see the reason why those letters do not exist on your computer and the reason for that jump.
Where are the letters A and B?
These letters have not disappeared because yes, what’s more, if you are of a certain age you will even remember them since they were used one day.
Their spaces were reserved for the old floppy diskssince early computer models such as the IBM PC from 1981 that carried the DOS operating system did not even accept hard drives. It only had two spaces to add these famous floppy disks, which, as you can guess, were assigned the letter A and B to differentiate them.
In 1983 it was with the IBM XT when Microsoft needed to add a new letter to its systems since this computer model was the first to include a hard drive, although it was only 10 MB and therefore C began to be used there.
The convenience of having your storage directly on the computer as well as the capacity of these that was increasing, unlike floppy disks that were only 1.44 MB and therefore their use was less and less frequent, made them stop using them. and therefore more and more a C was seen without any other in front of it.
With the passage of time and the disuse of these floppy disks, we never again saw the letter A and B on our Windows computer and the solid hard drive stayed with its C out of pure habit, since Microsoft would not know when to change it either, because although it sounds strange, surely there is someone somewhere in the world who still has a PC with floppy disks that he uses, and therefore messing with the letters now is absurd since many of the already designed paths of the programs look for C as root, and therefore changing them would make a very big and unnecessary chaos, apart from the fact that it will always be a good curiosity.
This only applies to Windows, other systems like MacOS or Linux are independent and their configuration is not based on Microsoft letters. What’s more, Apple indicates this on its website because doing it on Mac has no problems but it can cause errors regarding this curiosity if you apply it on Windows:
You should not change or delete the letter assigned to the Mac OS X partition while running Microsoft Windows.
It is something that surely you did not know although explained it can have its logic. Now you know, and you may be wondering the same thing as me, will we ever see a type of storage that replaces classic disks and therefore the letter C will disappear from our computers too? It is curious, but for now we will not know.
