Windows computers traditionally assign the main hard drive to the letter C because the letters A and B were historically strictly reserved for floppy disk drives back in the early days of personal computing.

A closer look

Windows computers traditionally assign the main hard drive to the letter C because the letters A and B were historically strictly reserved for floppy disk drives back in the early days of personal computing. Most people under the age of thirty have never even seen a physical floppy disk, let alone used a dual-drive system to boot up an operating system and load a word processor. Yet, the entire architectural hierarchy of modern Microsoft computers still pays silent homage to magnetic storage media that went obsolete decades ago. We are flying spaceships with software built on the foundational logic of a horse-drawn carriage. The fact that the digital heart of your ultra-fast, liquid-cooled gaming rig is alphabetically subordinate to a piece of tech from the nineteen-eighties is the exact flavor of legacy code stubbornness that makes the IT sector so incredibly frustrating