i like to pretend the C stands for computer and that's why

You're totally right. You could put DOS on one floppy and the driver on the other or just load it into RAM.

https://archive.org/details/dos-with-cd-rom-support

CD drivers did exist for DOS and you could absolutely boot up a system with one or two floppies, and one optical drive. MSCDEX.EXE was apparently what allowed you to connect to the optical drive.

Never heard of 'em!

A CD drive but no hard disk? I don't know of a DOS/Windows that would accept such a thing.

edit: nonsense

Yeah, aside from seeing them at a museum, I never saw them in use!

How floppy were they in comparison to the 5s?

8” floppy disks came before that.

-old man

you forgot the second :
love me some Devy

Depends. My first system had two hard drives, which came before optical drives, so I had C: and D: and then E: was my optical drive.

Eh, that sounds like a fun idea to me. I think it'd be nostalgic. I'm gonna look into that, actually :)

You know… someone somewhere MUST have built a system using two floppies and, like, a CD drive or something.

Also, trivial fact while I'm here that some may not know about: If your system only had one physical floppy, you could still use A: and B:. When you switched, it would prompt you (iirc) to swap the diskettes.

ah the glory days of sierra games.

Fun fact: that's why we call them icons.

A and b were floppy drives. It’s not hard people.

C:[Enter]###

A: had the DOS used to boot the computer, B: had the application. There was no C:. Then 5.25 floppies died and most people didn't see the need for a second 3.5 drive, hence A: and B:

The old ways are being forgotten. The oral history of the gray beards.

Why are some of the letters in the text weirdly "elongated"?

Damn A and B are just like El and Baal fr fr

It's a Windows convention, but, if you are old enough, it was a DOS convention and a CP/M convention.

Compact Frisbees

Not joking but I did 1800 support for Windows 95 and at the end, right before 98, there was a constant problem with a specific floppy and people would like call us and we would try to send them a cd replacement but could send the fixed floppy. It was silly because it was the most common call for a bit. Like that batch of floppies all died at the same time

D: for opdtical drive.

There were times when a Windows reinstall would name the system drive E: instead of C:, usually if one tried to reinstall without reformatting. That was truly, horribly cursed.

"And the bios sayeth unto the user: Come forth and insert disk 23 of 30. And they did so. When the needle of the drive tested the disk, it had become corrupted, verily."