"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.
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.
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?
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.
- Oliver
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