What I never understood was why eventually the B letter stopped being used even on machines that had two floppy disk drives. I remember very clearly using the second floppy on E:, F: and sometimes even D:, but I’ve never seen it being used as B:.
Was it reserved to some kind of swapping system that later became irrelevant with hard disks?
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.
What I never understood was why eventually the B letter stopped being used even on machines that had two floppy disk drives. I remember very clearly using the second floppy on E:, F: and sometimes even D:, but I’ve never seen it being used as B:.
Was it reserved to some kind of swapping system that later became irrelevant with hard disks?
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.