Programmer Humor

Going to show my age again now.

I think post 1990, they were rare. Essentially there was a time before that though, when computers often didn't have a hard drive. Because they were like 10MB and cost thousands of whatever your currency may be.

So in those days (8088/8086 based systems largely), it was common for there to be 2x5.25" drives. A: and B:. C: was a status symbol, the lambo of the early computer era.

As hard drives became more affordable (for levels of affordability), there was also the rise of the new disk type. 3.5". In that case it wasn't too uncommon to have a 3.5" drive, a 5.25" drive and a hard disk. So you'd have A:, B: and C:.

I think after the mid 90s the much more common setup was a single high density 3.5" drive A: and a hard disk C:. In the office we also had an F: drive (Novell netware network drive).

A: and B: were by and large kept free out of that history. I am pretty sure you can map HDDs/SSDs to them these days though if you want to.

For that brief period in the mid-'90s I owned a PC with twin 3½" floppy drives. I never really used the second one, but I enjoyed the novelty and the fact that all my drive letters were in use. I also saw a handful of computers with both 3½" and 5¼" drives in some of the university PC labs. I don't think I ever saw anyone use the 5¼" slot of any of them, but the 3½" floppy drives got a decent amount of use.

Fun fact though: You could still use B: in DOS commands even if you only had an A: drive. The system would prompt you to switch disks as and when A: was about to pretend to be B: and then switch back afterwards.

Before hard drives it was pretty common for systems to have two floppy drives, A: and B:

My computer at home had a single floppy (and two 10MB hard drives C: and D:), but the one at the school used for MIDI was an actual IBM PC with two drives. We'd boot up on A: and save our projects on B:. :)

I had one, A: is where the CP/M boot disc lived and B: was for all the actual stuff.

I had an 8086 with a 5.25 and a 3.5”. You could always change their assignments in the bios if you wanted

The b: drive was usually used to speed up a disk copy, especially to multiple copies, it was way faster than swapping out the disks. Remember that sometimes the whole contents of a disk didn't fit in available memory. There was a lot of disk swapping.

You could also just keep the msdos disk in a: and execute software from b: Also sometimes a command required reading from the msdos disk. It was handy to have the boot disk always available.

I don't recall using any software that specifically required two drives, but no doubt it existed.

I’ve had both. Also you could use b: as a substitute for a: if you had only one drrive. It would then ask you yo insert a disk before accessing