I’m sure you’ve noticed more than once when you enter your computer, that the main hard drive you access says C:, and if you add another one, it will continue with D: and so on. But then… why is there neither A nor B?
Today we are going to see the reason why these letters do not exist on your computer and the reason for this jump.
Where are the letters A and B?
These letters have not disappeared because yes, moreover, if you are of a certain age you will even remember them since they were used one day.
Their spaces were reserved for old floppy disks
In 1983, it was with the IBM XT that Microsoft had to add a new letter to its systems since this model of computer was the first to include a hard disk, even though it was only 10 MB and the So it started to be used there.
The convenience of having its storage directly on the computer as well as the capacity of these which increased, unlike the floppy disks which were only 1.44 MB and therefore their use w as less and less frequent, made them stop use and so more and more a C was seen without any other in front of it.
With time and the disuse of these floppy disks, we never saw the letter A and B again on our Windows computer and the solid hard disk remained with its C out of pure habit, because Microsoft would not know when to change it either , because even if it seems strange, surely there is someone somewhere in the world who still has a PC with floppy disks that he uses, and therefore playing with the letters now is nonsense since many paths already designed from programs look for C as their root, and so changing them would make 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. Also, Apple states this on their website because doing it on Mac is no problem but it may cause errors regarding this curiosity if you apply it on Windows:
You should not change or remove the letter assigned to the Mac OS X partition while running Microsoft Windows.
This is something you surely didn’t know although explaining it might have its logic. Now you know, and you may be asking yourself the same question as me, will we ever see a type of storage that will replace classic disks and therefore the letter C will also disappear from our computers? It’s curious, but for now we won’t know.
