Why is Windows giving my hard disk the letter C and not A or B for example?

Question

Wikipedia gives a good explanation about the logic of drive lettering:

Except for CP/M and early versions of MS-DOS, the operating systems assigns drive letters according to the following algorithm:

1. Assign the drive letter A: to the first floppy disk drive (drive 0), and B: to the second floppy disk drive (drive 1), if present.
2. Assign a drive letter, beginning with C: to the first active primary partition recognised upon the first physical hard disk.
3. Assign subsequent drive letters to the first primary partition upon each successive physical hard disk drive, if present within the system.
4. Assign subsequent drive letters to every recognised logical partition, beginning with the first hard drive and proceeding through successive physical hard disk drives, if present within the system.
5. Assign subsequent drive letters to any RAM Disk.
6. Assign subsequent drive letters to any additional floppy or optical disc drives.

It's a left over from the original PC designs. Originally PCs only had up to 2 floppy disk drives labelled A and B. Some time later hard disks got added and became drive C.

The hard disk letter is C because historically, drives A and B were for floppy disks. It has nothing to do with the language in which the operating system is written.

Ah, floppy disks, remember those?

You could spend a whole afternoon coding your latest killer app, then find that you couldn't save it because it was too big to fit on a 5.25" single density disk.

That was when floppies really were floppy. Thin and flimsy, usually in either 5.25" or 8" sizes, though the first internal drives that appeared in PCs were 5.25". As previously mentioned, the early versions of MS Dos used to automatically assign drive A: to the first floppy drive and B: to the second. Hard drives didn't even fit into PCs back then. You could buy a 5mb Winchester Hard Disk that weighed about 30Kg and came in a big external cabinet nearly the size of a modern mini tower pc.

If your PC had twin floppies you could type a command something like "copy a: b:" to copy the contents of drive A: to drive B:

But then that was all back in a time when Bill Gates was worth about $10,000!

Its because A and B used to be floppy drives back in the days when floppy drives were the norm and there were no hard-disks. The letter C was given to any hard disk that the user installed. The drives A and B have since then been reserved for floppy drives. This has nothing to do with programming languages.

While floppy drives were attached to drive 0 and 1 (A and B), nowadays, memory card and SD cards are like any other drive (hard-drives, CD-ROM readers, ...), and simply take any drive letter after C.

A and B are kept for backward compatibility reason.

To better illustrate how (finally, Q1 2014) floppy drives are fading away, consider the new Eclipse icons:

Lars Vogel just referenced this Stack Overflow question in his article "Eclipse org.eclipse.ui switches to png files and waves good bye to the floppy disk".

It illustrates that the next Eclipse Luna 4.4 will no longer show floppy disk, but rather icons which look "now a bit like a SD card".

They are designed by https://twitter.com/enleeten from http://www.l33tlabs.com/, using png file in order to:

support transparency and therefore also look good on a dark theme (background).

I find the difference subtle though:

After:

Before (old icons):

---

This was recorded in bug 422175:

Someone mentioned on twitter how the traditional save "floppy" idiom is somewhat anachronistic these days. So while working on the eclipse icons, we've created a new version of the save icon.

The new icon keeps the profile of the floppy icon but replaces the diskette sliding door with some electrical contacts, effectively turning the icon into a memory card. This ensures that the icon is recognized by most users as "save" while still being representative of modern storage media.

I've attached an image for comparison.

• The first row is the current icon,
• the second row was a more extreme change (making it look like an SD card) and
• the third row is the icon we're proposing in this bug.