On Tue, 19 Sep 2006 19:22:54 GMT, Oliver Wong wrote:
> "Roy Schestowitz" <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
> news:1454710.DveuxOJK0X@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>>
>> I actually thought about it (by no means for the first time) some time
>> this
>> morning. I also said it to people's faces. What sense does it all make?
>> Floppy is drive A? Why? Why is a hard-drive assigned a C? Where has B
>> gone?
>
> Back in the day, you were more likely to own 2 floppy disk drives than a
> harddrive. So your two floppy drives were A and B, and if you were rich
> enough to own a harddrive, the harddrive was C.
Even after hard drives were common, there was usually still two floppies,
on 3.5 and one 5.25" drive. When 5.25" floppies died, so did the need for
a second drive.
>> It doesn't make any sense, unless people are stuck on the 'Windows
>> mindset'.
>> And then come to consider the CD-ROM, which can be D, or E, or F, or who
>> knows what?
>
> After C, it seems to mostly be a first-come-first-serve thing. If you
> install a CD drive, then it'll probably be D. And if you install a harddisk
> after that, it'll probably be E, and so on.
Actually, the BIOS mounts primary partitions first, then logical
partitions, so the primary partition on drive 1 then drive 2 will come
before logical partitions on drive 1, etc..
>> And I sometimes have people ask me a question like, "do you get
>> access to drive K?". How is that in any way self-explanatory?
>
> Out of context, it's not self-explanatory, just like "do you get access
> to /dev/cdrom?" On my computer? In general? Under which account?
Indeed, a network can be mapped in any number of ways using SMB or NFS.
>> Why make
>> virtual aliases rather than mount locations using a sensible structure
>> that
>> is separable from device names (e.g. /dev(ice)/cdrom, /dev(ice)/floppy)?
>> It
>> would never make sense to me, but it did _at the time_. When I was using
>> DOS
>> and Windows, that is...
>
> DOS stands for Disk Operating System. It was disk oriented. As such,
> each disk (whether floppy disk, harddisk, compact disk, etc.) is a first
> class citizen and is assigned their own drive letter. It remains today in
> Windows mainly due to momentum and backwards compatibility. NTFS allows you
> to mount harddrives at arbitrary points in a folder hierarchy in the same
> manner that UNIX does, but it's not a very popular feature. On some of my
> older systems, I used to mount extra harddrives at "C:\Program Files" and
> "C:\Documents and Settings" for example.
Yeah, people seem to like the drive letter shortcuts. Also, there's still
a lot of legacy software that assumes drive letters only. Further, you can
access network drives using UNC's, like \\computer1\myfolder instead of
mapping the drive letter, but people like the drive letter anyways.
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