Why is the hard drive labeled C?

Answer 1

C:/ c is the hard drive a brilliant question, as a computer tech, i always just accepted it as fact upon contemplation i would answer that it is a randomly chosen identifer for the local drive you would probably have had to be there when the engineer was configuring, for all intents and purposes, one of the first Artificial Intelligence prototypes and, well, "i'll name it C" you could probably get the correct answer from a archived computer book, documentary, etc you will never see "his" notes c (lower case) is the constant for the speed of light Note: This is a correct answer but somebody changed the question on you...It has been reverted back to the original. Answer 2: The earliest computers operating under the various DOS versions were not equipped with a hard drive. They operated, in some cases by running the operating system out of one floppy drive and using the second floppy for applications. The floppies were addressed as A and B. After hard drives began to be installed, it was still common for computers to have two floppies. After the old 5-1/4 floppy format gave way to the new 3-1/2, it was common to find both drives on computers because the user was assumed to have all their important stuff still on the old 5-1/4's. That created a bit of a problem because the A and B were so firmly entrenched in their use for addressing the floppy drives that it was impractical to use A or B for anything else. Also, software was written to default to the C-drive when programs were installed. C:\ does not always refer to a hard drive, it is used to address the first un-hidden DOS sector on an IDE or SATA device. As such, a hard drive may be partitioned to have many partitions and those partitions can be assigned letters of your choosing by using drive management programs. Networked computers can also map different letters to various network locations. Optical drives are generally going to take a higher letter if the system has a hard drive. The C-drive does not always have to refer to a hard drive. When a virtual drive is created in memory, as when you use Windows' recovery, it can be addressed as C. Linux, Unix and MacOS do not use any drive letters.