There letter Cused to indicate themain hard disk drive in Windows computersis a convention that has its roots in the early history of information technology. The answer lies in fact transition from floppy disks to hard disks and in the evolution of software and hardware in the 1980s. In fact, in the very first PCs, the letters A and B were assigned to floppy drivesportable memory devices that allowed you to start the computer and manage data. When hard disks, or hard disks, were introduced into PCs, they were identified with the next letter, namely C. This practice, which was initially a technical necessity, has turned into a standard still used today.
Because the local disk is marked with C
In the 80swhen personal computers were starting to become widespread, hard disk technology was still expensive and not very accessible. PCs, like the famous one IBM PCwere equipped with 5.25-inch floppy drives, capable of holding just 360 kilobytes of data, a negligible amount by today’s standards. THE floppy disks they were used both for start the operating system than to store programs and files. The first logical drive, marked with the letter A, was intended for these diskettes. If you had a second floppy disk drive, it was labeled B. This system allowed for easier data management: you could, for example, boot the system from A and use B to save files or transfer information.
With technological evolution and the decrease in their production costs, hard drives began to spread like wildfire in the computer market. These storage devices, more capacious and faster than floppies, marked a real revolution. The operating system MS-DOSwhich was the basis of most PCs of the time (and which was essentially the ancestor of modern Windows), however, it was already designed to recognize floppy drives as A and B. When hard drives became common, they were therefore assigned the next available letter: a C precisely. This choice also had a practical function: keeping the first letters reserved for floppy disks ensured that, in the event of problems with the hard disk, the computer could still be started using a system diskette.
The letter C continues to be used today
In the following decades, as floppies were gradually abandoned, the use of C as the main drive letter remained. This happened not only as a matter of continuity with the past, but above all because the computer industry had now adapted to this convention. Other types of memory devices, such as CD players And DVDthey then inherited the next available letters, such as D and ANDand the same goes for USB drives and all other storage devices. Today, although floppy disks are a distant memory and even the use of CDs and other physical media is increasingly less common (in favor of cloud storage services), the main drive continues to be identified with the letter C and now you know also the why.
