Why don't computers have B drives?

http://ask.yahoo.com/20050304.html

Makes perfect sense. Thanks, aidje.

B drive = A drive
It’s from the days of DOS I believe.
I know this from when I was messing around with one of my old DOS machines.

That Yahoo answers has the technical reasoning. I just know I could access the files on the floppy via A or B.

Something to add, if I remember correctly from my computer days growing up:

A drive: 5 1/4” floppy disks
B drive: 3 1/2” floppy disks

@Trustinglife: reverse the floppy disk dimensions and you’ve got it.

This question makes my feel so old!

no, no, no
The first IBM PC’s had two 5 1/4 drives. For example you would boot from the A drive and use the B drive for your data.
When you started LOTUS 1–2-3 you would boot from the DOS drive, then put the Lotus floppy in the A drive and use the B drive for your data. YOur maximum file ***.wk1 was 360K.

When IBM introduced its first hard drive it was designated the C:> drive because A and B were already in use.

SRM

I had an old 8088 Packard Bell with two 5 1/4” floppy drives and no hard drive. That, along with a CGA monitor set me back $1,000.

Huh. I have a pretty clear memory that 5 1/4” was A, and 3 1/2” was B. Maybe I’m wrong… a quick scan of the lengthy Wiki article didn’t clear it all up for me. (Though it did have some fun pictures.)

my memory is based on an original Compaq “LUGGABLE” that weighed about 28 lbs. and had to be transported on a shlepper and bungie. You know a little wheeled cart with a bungee cord holding the machine in place.

That machine had a left drive (A) and a right drive (B). You were constantly swapping 5 1/4 disks especially in Lotus 1–2-3 which used to look for a copy protected sector on the boot drive every so often.

I used to get a lot of looks dragging that thing on the NYCity subway and then the commuter lines to Westchester.

It had 256k of memory and cost over $6,000 in 1983.

SRM

When hard drives became common, it was no longer necessary to have two physical floppy drives, but it was often useful to swap disks, and so the same drive could be referred to as A: or B:—and MSDOS would prompt you to switch disks as necessary.

Also, I don’t think there ever was a convention for whether A: or B: was 3.5” or 5.25”. It probably depended on the manufacturer of the computer. On some of the machines I used, A: and B: were the same 5.25” drive, and the 3.5” drive was D:, for instance. And I can remember clones where A: was the 5.25” drive, and IBM machines where A: was the 3.5” drive.

the 5.25” preceded the 3.5 by at least two years.

We used 8 inch diskettes for stand alone word processors from CPT back in the late 70’s
SRM