There was a brief window of time where CD burners were new and beyond my financial reach, and so were new Zip drives, but companies were dumping Zip drives for rewritable CDs. I managed to score a free external Zip drive that was going to be trashed, and it was a godsend of an upgrade from 3.5" floppies.

Until I got a second-hand CD-RW drive, then I dumped it too.

That was my E:\ drive!

(D:\ was the CD-ROM, of course.)

Yes, but they got the letter Z, obviously. For the makers spoke: I created Windows 95 and I will give you the power to map your drive letters. But behold! Thou shake only map removable drives and let the hard drives be, for these are still assigned the old way by the old system.

My dad thought they were gonna be the fucking future and was trying to get everyone in the house to use it and my mom knew about the fact they can die and that she'd rather use disks.

I liked it, it sucked when my first ever back up of all my files from the family computer was no longer accessible due to the red light of death.

Zip drives, zif drives.

These helped drive compact flash storage.

Nintendo had it right all along with cartridges … just they didn’t have the capacity of optical media.

I think the convention was to put the fixed internal drives first because they were more unlikely to change, and then use the later letters for external swappable drives.

In the time when the B: drive was relevant a lot of software might have had hard coded the letters, so it made sense to avoid it to preserve the compability with legacy software as more drives were added.