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There were reasons for drive letters. It was common to have floppy-only systems back in the day, so you were switching out floppies for everything from running

by II2II 1y ago

There were reasons for drive letters. It was common to have floppy-only systems back in the day, so you were switching out floppies for everything from running software to accessing your data. The drive letter was the most meaningful way to identify where you were looking for that data. Later on, when hard drives were common, people still used things like floppies and optical media. Drive letters were still more meaningful in that context. Drive letters started losing their relevance with USB mass storage (especially when the media was the device), and are minimally relevant today (when external storage is far more likely to be on the network). The lack of proper abstraction sucks when you have multiple hard drives, but I'm pretty sure that Windows has taken care of that from several angles. Those features simply aren't used often. (And, since I'm not a Windows user, take that bit with a grain of salt.)

kstrauser 1y ago
No way. AmigaDOS in 1985 referred to all disks either by device name (like DH0: for Disk, Hard, number 0 or DF1: for Disk, Floppy, number 1) or label (like "Workbench:" or "Work:" or "Defender of the Crown 2:"). If a program tried to open "Some App 2:datafile", the OS would prompt you to insert the disk named "Some App 2". Drive letters were a poor alternative even way back then.
- LocalH 1y ago
  It was also very handy that you could arbitrarily assign names to folders and have them be treated across the system as a volume name. Got some non-copyprotected software that expects to run from the volume name of the floppy? Copy the contents of the disk into a folder, assign the volume name of the floppy to that folder, and it will most likely just work. If it's a self-booting disk you may also need to copy the contents of some system folders into your actual system folders (c, libs, devs, etc) but other than that, with regards to the filesystem, volume assigns were very powerful (and in OS 2.0 and up you could also chain these assigns across different folders)
  - kstrauser 1y ago
    Oh man, those were such nice features. And again, we had all this while DOS was still screwing around with drive letters.

by II2II 1y ago

kstrauser 1y ago

No way. AmigaDOS in 1985 referred to all disks either by device name (like DH0: for Disk, Hard, number 0 or DF1: for Disk, Floppy, number 1) or label (like "Workbench:" or "Work:" or "Defender of the Crown 2:"). If a program tried to open "Some App 2:datafile", the OS would prompt you to insert the disk named "Some App 2". Drive letters were a poor alternative even way back then.

LocalH 1y ago
It was also very handy that you could arbitrarily assign names to folders and have them be treated across the system as a volume name. Got some non-copyprotected software that expects to run from the volume name of the floppy? Copy the contents of the disk into a folder, assign the volume name of the floppy to that folder, and it will most likely just work. If it's a self-booting disk you may also need to copy the contents of some system folders into your actual system folders (c, libs, devs, etc) but other than that, with regards to the filesystem, volume assigns were very powerful (and in OS 2.0 and up you could also chain these assigns across different folders)
- kstrauser 1y ago
  Oh man, those were such nice features. And again, we had all this while DOS was still screwing around with drive letters.