Of Computers and Disc Drives: A Tale of Woe and Behold

[Note: I originally wrote this in 2016 but forgot to post it. Rereading it, I think it has some interest and even amusement–so I’m posting it now.]

Ever wonder why the main drive on most computers is the C) drive? Did it stand for “C”omputer? No, that would be too simple and logical. The real story is much more amusing.

When computers first became small and inexpensive enough for ordinary people to purchase them, the discs that spun to deliver programs and data to the processor were called “floppy” drives because they were made out of flexible materials. At that time the “hard drives” we are so familiar with these days cost tens of thousands of dollars and were used with room-filling computing machines.

The earliest personal computers had one drive slot for the flexible disc. Naturally enough, that drive was labelled “A”. The method of operation was that the hobbyist (and the only people crazy enough to bother with this stuff were all hobbyists) had a disc which contained the Operating System for the computer. After loading the disc, the disc would spin up and the computer would read its contents into its (tiny) memory. The operator would then pull the disc and insert a disc with the program they wanted to run. They might have to pull out that disc and replace it with another if they wanted to manipulate data, write it to a disc, etc.

Then there was a Great Leap Forward. Someone got the idea of providing two floppy drives instead of just one. The operating system (O/S) and or programs could be loaded into drive “A” and the data churned and written out to the new drive, “B”. And so for several years, most personal computers came with two floppy drives, A and B.

In 1983 I became the proud owner of very first computer to feature a hard drive. This was the Kaypro 10 which belonged to a class of computers often called “lunchbox” computers because, well, because they looked like a lunchbox. Whereas we were all dealing with floppy discs that contained data quantities measured in kilobytes, the Kaypro 10’s hard drive sported a 10 megabyte drive. A quantity that seemed almost beyond measure in those days. It was so much bigger that when Kaypro delivered the machine it partitioned it so that user would have two 5 megabyte drives labelled “A” and “B”. And since there was little or no networking in those days, users still needed a way to get data into and out of the hard drive, so a floppy drive was provided as well, and that was called “C”.

Okay, so by this point I wouldn’t blame anyone from yawning. So what? Who cares? Well, it turns out that all this was very important for one of the few times I ever had to go to court and sue someone. It happened like this.

In 1983 I was the business manager for the Hillel Foundation of Berkeley, CA. If you aren’t familiar with it, the short description is that this is a non-profit organization trying to serve the needs of Jewish students at the University of California. Like most business managers then and now, keeping track of agency finances was a bit of a nightmare. Mostly because people involved with charitable non-profits really don’t know or care much about business. Many of you also know that these days there are very powerful accounting programs which are very affordable. But that was certainly not the case in 1983. The programs were costly and difficult to use.

One company, located in the SF Bay area offered a program designed for Kaypro computers. It wasn’t cheap (about $500 as I recall), but the management group at our foundation discussed it and decided it would be worth the cost to improve our financial administration (which was entirely paper based at the time). The program arrived and I put the program disc into our computer.

I inspected the files on the disc and ran the program called “install.” After spinning for a bit, it put up a message on the screen: “Place the disc in your ‘A’ drive.” Of course the A drive was the hard disc, so it wasn’t physically possible to do this. I called the company for technical support. After the usual delays and runarounds, they said, “You can’t install the program from the “C” drive because the installer doesn’t know anything about a “C” drive. So how can I install the program? “We don’t know.”

Sadly, we had to request a refund. The Foundation was not wealthy enough to simply forego a $500 cost. And they replied that all sales are final.

So it was off to court we went. The trial was pretty comical. We sued in Small Claims Court where attorneys are not allowed. But as it happened, the chair of our Board was a lawyer, so he represented us anyway. As it turned out, the company’s support person was also an attorney. Their attorney accused us of violating the rules by using an attorney. The judge looked incredulous–but aren’t you an attorney too? He threw his hands in the air and said, you’re both attorneys so lets get on with a trial.

They maintained their position that even though the software didn’t work and they weren’t able to make it work, “all sales are final” and we (apparently) had agreed to that. We pointed to the fact that their advertising stated the software was compatible with Kaypro computers, but now they were saying “it is but not yours.” Our attorney simply pointed to the California statute which states that there are implied warranties whenever merchandise is sold. One of those implied warranties is that a product will work as it is commonly understood to work.

It took the judge about 15 seconds to order the company to refund our money. But notice that the entire matter was caused by the inability of a program to deal with different drive letters that might be assigned to the program.

One more aside. IBM was not far behind in the personal computer space and it soon introduced its own small business computer that featured a 10MB hard drive–the IBM XT. IBM’s Operating System decided to reserve the first two letters for floppy drives and assigned the hard drive the letter “C”. And it has been that way to this day.

Now lets fast forward from 1983 to 2016. CPM (the operating system of the Kaypro) has been relegated to the dustbins of history. IBM and Microsoft went on to dominate the personal computer market. Although Apple has come on strong in recent years, the worldwide market is still overwhelmingly a Microsoft world. And to this day, the Operating System assumes that if there are drives called “A” or “B” that they are floppy drives, and the main system drive will be labelled “C.” Generally speaking, most people have all or most of their available disc space on their “C” drive, so there isn’t much of an issue any more. But vendors know that people also have reasons for dividing their discs into multiple slices or “partitions” so usually installation software is programmed to prompt the user for the drive letter to use for installation.

Strangely enough, at least for a while, we appear to be back in the universe where drive letters matter.

[Update for 2025: although Apple has indeed “come on strong,” drive letters still matter!]