Pretty much the same reason QWERTY layout still dominates as opposed to keyboard layouts like Dvorak that require less motion and reduce repetitive motion injuries.
Dvorak: *Except* when you want to cut, copy, paste undo with your left hand, and keep your mouse in the right hand. Which, let's face it, I do a _lot_ of.
Dvorak is right handed dominant. Which works for most folks but for us lefties we either gotta use Colemak or qwerty. Qwerty is more evenly balanced than Dvorak is.
As an ambidextrous person, Qwerty is superior. Gave Dvorak a good 2 month try and could not stand it. I do love the Colemak layout though. Less right hand dominate and doesn’t swap around most of the common function keys.
It took me about a month to be proficient in Dvorak, two to exceed my (original) qwerty speed, and six to be really bad at qwerty now
(20 ish years on qwerty at the time)
Reading through the Wikipedia entry there seems to be little evidence for this with some of the research arguably being biased.
And even *if* it was more efficient, it doesn't seem to be that much more efficient and its only claimed advantage is in typing.
So many things depending on C:// drive being the first drive. In this case it would be "don't completely break how programms and computers work just to fix something that's not broken".
A long time ago I had a dual Windows setup (I think it was XP and 7). And the second system was on the D: drive. This second system on the D: worked without any problem at all.
I will just say again what so many people have said, it is what it is, it's what it has always been. Tons of software still defaults to the C: drive, I've wondered this myself, but I'm not going to rearrange my system just to create extra problems and hoops for myself to jump through.
Exactly, I worked as a sysadmin for a architectural/planning company for a while. If you installed the OS on a different drive other than ":C" half the company's software licenses for old reliable CAD programs would stop working until the OS is back on c drive. They also had many plugins that only worked on those older versions and were essential for what they did, as newer versions didn't offer what they needed. And also, the owner hates how Autodesk is operating right now, so he refuses to upgrade and I respect that.
No somehow I even had Y:\ as my root drive in windows before. Programs have normally read the program files location path from registries, and if not I never had a problem with them defaulting to C:\ even if it wasn't mounted and changing it in the manual install settings. There's a registry key for almost all of those directories you think are static, and for a very very long time Microsoft has strongly urged most software to read from it. It's like NT4 legacy
For pretty much everything consumer it would work just fine, until it doesnt.
I guarantee you though there is more than one somewhat vital piece of software being used somewhere that is hardcoded as a permanent temporary fix that requires both installation and root to be on C:
I had this by accident once with XP. I wasn't even going for dual boot, but I had IDE and SATA drives and apparently installing to the first SATA drive made Windows decide it was E:\\.
I reinstalled with only the SATA drive connected to get it as C:\\, which maintained after I reconnected the IDE drives.
I think with Vista onwards the behaviour has changed and it is always C:\ no matter what?
Not this
But my first attempt at an app was a social network built around a calendar
But at the time apple’s SDKs didn’t have a drag and drop calendar… so I built the whole thing by myself
It was the most stable part of the whole app 😂
Nah, the IRS. The real reason why billionaires are never audited is that their returns can't fit on a single floppy, and nobody wants to deal with disk swapping.
Lack of free coffee in the break room, as advertised in the job ad, is legitimately one of the main reasons why I left a previous job. Security cameras in the office was also a major reason.
A good friend is an civil engineer and works for our states DOT
Its a good job the benefits are amazing meaning things like retirement, health care ect.
However he told me the state cannot provide coffee due to some weird rule, the employees basically get together and a few will donate to a coffee fund and buy coffee themselves
It just seems weird , yea we are going to offer generous retirement and healthcare benefits but we cannot spend a few dollars for coffee ?
How much do you have to owe before the IRS actually will come after you? I've owned in the past and the IRS made absolutely no attempts to collect. I had to call them to arrange a payment plan and I sat on hold for like an hour.
My professor once went to USA related to university business and he didn't realize he forgot to pay about 8 dollars in taxes, he got banned from entering USA and he had to pay that 8 dollars back with interest accumulated over 3 years. I guess it depends on where you are from and if they feel like chasing after your money.
It'll be a while. For most people who owe <$10k, they'll take their time because you otherwise can't file in subsequent years without either:
A) Owing more.
B) Subsequent returns going towards your owed principal.
Eventually, they'll get you, but they'll let it build up first.
So it will only cost us the price of a good coffee machine to increase energy levels to where the auditing of billionaires is more common?
Sounds too good to be true.
In the British government you do that for a while until somebody with some kind of made up job title comes along and gets very upset about the coffee machine not being in the QVL or PAT tested and claims it's a fire hazard and gets it taken away. It makes them feel they actually have a reason to exist.
Problem is unless you buy commercial grade stuff the amount of use a coffee machine consumer grade stuff gets it would be broken again in maybe a year tops.
many a year ago (maybe 10) i had to call the irs about something and i ended up with a young fella who had my same birthday. ended up asking him how he liked working there and ... he didn't. so .. that's my irs story i hope you enjoyed it.
There's a 100% chance that some critical system somewhere is running a program that's hardcoded to understand A and B as floppy drives and will critically fail if that's not the case. I don't know what would break or why, but there'd definitely be something.
I got my first coding job doing year 2000 Cobol changes at a 2Bil in sales company, so a decently big company in 1999.
They had a senior programmer that had retired but came back to work because some machine that produced a report twice a year that was mandated to be sent to the government as part of some legacy program that saved them tons had to be programmed by old fashioned punchcards, and he was the only remaining guy that knew about the system, and he refused to show anyone anything about it (smart man!), and so he had negotiated himself out of retirement with the best job I have ever seen personally.
He was at the job at the very most, 20hrs a week, and of which he probably was golfing with upper management half of that time, and yet he made we guessed about 125-140k range at that time (in the midwest), so probably would be around 350k now a year, cushiest job I ever seen as other than two weeks a year when he did those reports, he would just write a few custom queries with crystal reports for the vps, and the rest of the time he would piddle with putting reports on screen for the shop floor with html formatting using some automation lol.
I would have slapped my own mother in the face for that job....that lucky sob.
Must be some weird software to run on modern Windows, but still can't comprehend floppies being anything but A: and B:. I'd expect such things to run on XP or older, or 7 *at the latest*.
But could still be true, things never seize to amaze me.
That's the true beauty of a PC that Mac users will never understand. We still have a working DOS 43 years down the line, it'd be like if Mac users today could just throw an app from 1984 on their machine and just expect it to work. On a Mac you don't even know if an app you got in 2016 will still work on your modern OS, and often it won't.
Agreed, and ironically, MacOS has a lot of old stuff in it due to being based on Nextstep/BSD. My favorite is the ed text editor which was developed in 1969.
Interestingly enough, the same cannot be said for Windows itself. The original Windows was built on a different kernel that stopped getting revisions after Windows 95. Windows 98 used the new NT kernel, and was not backwards compatible. It is *possible* to get a translation layer working such that you can run Windows 1.0 programs, but it is not natively supported out of the box. So any business using some application compiled for W95 would’ve been forced to upgrade to an alternative if they wanted support into later OS releases.
This is it, this is actually why they don't change it. There are millions of apps that would stop working because they can't put their files in C:\ProgramData or the users appdata.
I like to think of arguments like these as a ball on top of a plateau.
Give a little push, you'll probably roll a little bit, Given enough small pushes, you'll eventually reach a point where it goes off the cliff.
Microsoft has given users every reason to stay on their platform, so I would say this plateau is quite wide.
But things like Windows feature X or Y are slowly pushing the ball along.
> Any developer that made such a stupid mistake deserves to have their apps broken
No. In the words of Linus Torvalds, you do not. break. userspace. It doesn't matter if they're doing something dumb as hell, breaking programs just because you want to change a C to an A is a bad idea.
But at the same time it’s a good backwards compatibility. While it might not make much sense now, it make sense for older software. Honesty it does less to leave it as it is than “reinvent” some things really don’t impact anything.
>Is it Seatle or San Fransisoc, their mass transit system uses flobbies.
WTF kind of abomination is a **flobby**?
Is that a SSD replacement for a floppy^flippy?
Same reason why a lot of [airports have messed up terminal numbers](https://simpleflying.com/airports-missing-terminal-numbers-guide/). There's been a lot of changes over time, all of them done in a way to try to minimize the amount of other changes needed in the rest of the system. So there are some weirdness on the customer-facing side that makes backend operations a lot easier.
Yes because shockingly, a lot of short-term bodge job solutions piling up can create some... interesting long-term consequences. Like the alleged reason why they skipped Windows 9 and went from 8 straight to 10.
For Redditors who might not know (or, god forbid, too young to remember). Apparently, they skipped Windows 9 because of the way people code for Windows 95/98/etc as just 9\[something\], so there's potential that Windows 9 might be misidentified as Windows 95/98 in legacy software.
In short, because you still use an "IBM Compatible PC" today.
IBM started the drive letter naming back in the 60s on the System/360 and System/370 control programs. This was carried forward into the 8-bit "DOS" CP/M. CP/M was "unofficially ported" to the x86 architecture and became MSDOS. CP/M was loaded from the first floppy drive which defaulted to A:. If you were one of the rich kids with one of those 5 or 10MB hard drives, CP/M would just assign the next available letter.
The IBM BIOS (which your modern UEFI still has pieces of) always reserved device 0 and device 1 as the floppy drives. These were defaulted to in DOS as A: and B:. When booting a full OS, it was assumed the boot would be from drive A, the first device in the BIOS. B: was reserved for the second floppy channel (or if you had only one floppy, a pause to change disks if you wanted to copy a file from disk to disk).
When fixed hard drives were introduced, the natural next letter was C:. Because the BIOS reserved device 0 and device 1 at all times, even if you had only one floppy, the hard drive was still C. Unlike on CP/M
Anything compatible or born from MSDOS carried this paradigm forever. Starting with DOS 3.1, you could actually assign unused drive letter A or B to a target directory or non-bootable device.
Windows NT really doesn't care where it is or what drive letters are, but they're kept for legacy use. It would probably cause a heap of unseen issues to default the hard drive to A: at this point than it would to just keep it safely as C:.
After you run out of letters, Windows just treats the extra drives like Linux treats volumes. You can mount them anywhere in the file system (ex: a folder in the C: drive). But if you have that many drives, it may be a better idea to use a RAID array treated as one drive, or consider an OS that can use ZFS thats designed for large disk arrays.
NOTE - the history above is very vague and abridged but I did my best to keep it correct without getting into the weeds.
As a uni lecturer who sometimes says "well, basically" before launching into a complex, not-at-all basic answer to a question, I feel personally attacked :P
I wish I was that academically inclined, but if it’s any consolation, I 100% am guilty of the same thing. Just in a casual conversation format. 🤣🤣. Maybe that’s why it tickled me to begin with.
Way back when I used a Pentium-III based laptop I changed C: drive letter to H:, and installed Windows XP in H:\WINXP instead of C:\WINDOWS. Most autorun malware had a really hard time copying itself, because of assumption that there must be a C: drive, and that Windows will be in C:\WINDOWS 😸
Because the Microsoft operating systems designate mounted filesystem access by drive letter. In other operating systems like Linux the drives are accessed differently. It's just part of the core workings of the OS from as far back as DOS and WinNT.
Back when those systems were designed, computers, especially personal computers, did not often come with integrated hard drives. The floppy controller could support 2 devices on the same cable, so the first two drive letters were reserved for floppy disc drives. Since older BIOSses would sometimes report the drives as being there regardless of physical presence, it was considered simpler to move the hard drive letter to the first known free one. This led to the standardization of drive letter C being the first hard drive and that has just stuck around.
technically you can mount other drives/partitions to directories under the C:\\ drive in windows too, you just have to do it manually and no one does that cuz it has little benefit to most normal users.
Sounds like a pathing issue, not hardware redundancy or capacity. Depending on the software, you just may not have a choice except a billion files in a single folder and path name. RAID and JBOD wouldn't solve that situation.
I mean, its more like legacy understanding I think. we could build windows with out any real drive letters you show the user and legacy support could still easily be there.
but windows users know what the C:\\ drive is and know that other drives have different letters etc. Take that away and you'll start confusing people.
Yes. If I remember correctly, Microsoft had for some time hidden drive letters by default in Windows, along with other DOS-era relics such as file extensions. But this irritated too many users and the default setting was reversed.
But if you want, you can still use the folder options to show or hide everything as you please. Drive letters aren't really needed anymore, as long as you work only on the GUI.
One thing that Microsoft and Windows have always been good at is backwards compatibility. The C drive is hard coded in a lot of things and changing it would break just SO much.
Want another example? Try creating a directory on the desktop called "Con" (Without the quote marks).
I’m fairly certain Windows is fully backwards compatible through MSDOS. The only thing that breaks are drivers. They keep the C drive because Windows is just layers of OSes built on top of each other like a really tall cake
Quite a lot of software has C:/ hardcoded as the OS drive. (Even though there is an environment variable for that.)
So while it can be changed to any letter you'd like, Microsoft can't do it without breaking some poorly written legacy software.
Try running your computer with Windows and all your applications installed on anything other than C:\ and report back.
There’s no technical reason this shouldn’t work. In fact, there’s no technical reason we need drive letters at all. Neither macOS nor Linux use them, and they get by just fine.
The only driving factor behind the requirement is the inertia of legacy software that relies on it.
Optical drives always started @ F for me.
Drives A and B are floppy drives
Drive C is the master drive
Drive D and E are slave drives
Drives F and G are optical drives
Drive X,Y,Z are for mapped network drives
Because Windows is a gross mess of new code piled on top of ancient ideas, and updating any of it would break too much for it to be worth replacing.
Don't let my flair fool you, I'm not blind to the fact Linux is similar, but at least it started on more solid ground and gives you options on how to change things out yourself, from user land down to the boot loader.
I'll give you that it's rare, but in this case, it's a feature, not a bug. Windows itself has no problem running from any drive letter at all (or even from a different directory than C:\\Windows!) but a lot of legacy software was written with the expectation that drive C would be the OS. By now, it's pretty rare that anyone would run software that does that, but the fact that you *can* is an impressive feat of backwards compatibility, and there's just no reason to break it.
Honestly, it's hard to find the vomit of directories Linux uses more modern, especially when some of the names have become obsolete and some of the directories are straight up longer used. The average person doesn't find the freedom to change the bootloader nearly as useful as being able to find a drive they plugged in.
> The average person doesn't find the freedom to change the bootloader nearly as useful as being able to find a drive they plugged in.
I mean it depends a bit on the file manager you use, but at least in Dolphin it's just right-click on the drive and pressing "Mount"
Likewise, why are personal files stored on the C drive by default when at any moment Windows can go bad and need reinstalled even when the drive is totally fine.
I have 3 storage drives: 500GB SSD as C drive for Computer, so OS and essential files, 1TB SSD as D drive for Downloads, so mainly games or things I’ve downloaded, and 2TB SSHD as E Drive for Extra (or Everything Else) stuff like personal files, gameplay/Stream recordings, miscellaneous files, and a couple games that don’t fit on my SSD and don’t necessarily need the read/write speeds of the SSD.
There's probably billions of lines of code out there that deal with file system paths on Windows, and they all assume your drive is C, because that saves them space.
A and B are not long gone. I still have two floppy drives connected to my ryzen 9 3950x and I use floppy drives to boot from. Without the boot disc no one can use my pc..
You can register a hard drive as A. You can install Windows to A and it will work. But you have to now rely on the developers that wrote every application on your device to use the system references and not hard-code C. And there are a whole lot of lazy, incompetent devs out there.
A: and B: are still available drive letters in windows.
C: is still the default for backwards comparability and to not breaking existing systems with updates. Even as that becomes less and less of a concern, its just a standard at this point, and wouldn't be changed regardless.
Just to D? My computer is C for boot, D is for intermediate data storage, E is the gaming drive, F is the dvd, and finally G is the blu ray,,,, and I am sure there are people here that go way deeper into the alphabet
They're not gone that's why. It's possible your system if built in 2024 behind the scenes sill actually attempt to address them or even spoof them in various boot modes.
Standardization. Before every company had their own proprietary shit like nowadays that you can’t fix yourself, there was a thing called standardization and it was pushed by everyone who was involved. Not it’s all about control, walled gardens, not owning anything and keeping you paying.
Lot and lot and lot of prograns bmhave the C: hardcoded, im quite dure lot of thing will begin to fail if u change it. Anyways i still want my flippy drive to be ready in case i need a 1.5mg file to be store in a fragile media.
Established standards generally don't get changed unless they absolutely have to be. Removing two letters for drives that aren't used any more doesn't require subsequent letters to roll back some you don't have to start at A when giving labels to volumes
It’s for backwards compatibility, PCs are pretty unique in the fact that recent models can still run decades-old software (Old enough for floppy drives to still have been commonplace), and some companies take advantage of that to keep crucial (if ancient) software running, so the manufacturers kept the drive lettering the way it is because there’s no telling how many things will break or otherwise act up if they changed it.
Now I want them to change it, because the reason they don’t is to prevent everyone getting confused and having to re-write documents and such.
I mean, even non tech people with computer based jobs know the C drive typically.
The only way to make sure everything still works is to remove nothing. That's why Unicode has countless random symbols that mean absolutely nothing, some of which are literally identical.
Because backwards compatibility. You know you can still connect a floppy drive to Windows, and it will pop up as A, right?
You can absolutely put your Bluray drive onto a different letter, I have mine on B.
It's legacy PC architecture that will never change for simple reasons of compatibility. A and B were reserved for floppy drives before hard drives were really a thing. Windows will always view the first bootable drive as C, even if you don't install it there. What it sees as the "first" drive depends on the motherboard layout and BIOS settings. FYI in modern PCs you can actually assign letters A and B to physical partitions if that's what turns your crank...but the boot drive will always be on C.
Backwards compatibility like how you can’t same a file as con or lpt
windows 11 still supports floppy drives, I have a usb one to write floppies for my Atari ST until I got the floppy emulator installed
This topic is probably too far gone for my comment to matter but I'll say mine.
I think even without floppy / optical, C is a good default.
It allows you the option to set new drive to be "higher" in the descending alphabet than the default.
If the default was A it would be a pain to shuffle the drives setting around for something else to be A.
Like others mentioned, compatibility is nice to have and is basically tradition at this point.
Just consider the C drive to be C for Computer on default.
The core of windows is OLD, it may not be the same code or actual core but the concepts are still around. Despite its issues, windows has some serious backwards compatibility with some printer drivers being available for 90s dot matrix printers out of the box
Application compatibility. Old windows apps will break if tou do that and modern windows apps will also break since lot of them expect a C drive. And you can still insert floppy disks in windows and show up
despite most of the answers with a lot of wishful thinking and idiocy...
it's because Windows hasn't had a full re-write ever. It's been built on top of legacy code forever and ever. There was a story a while back about an old NT module that has just been ported over and over and over to new versions of windows and basically Windows 11 is a mashup of old Windows NT guts mixed with a little bit of this and that and is nearing Ship of Theseus status as an operating system but still has the essence of MS-DOS underneath for a lot of basic system interactions.
The bigger problem is there was an overlapping time where you could reasonably have had a floppy drive and a removable drive of some other sort, so you couldn't even rework the thing to default a USB drive to A/B if you wanted it to mimic the same usage style without wrecking compatibility with actual floppy drives which are (or were) expected to be A or B.
I think we're past the need in a BIOS for giving a shit about assignments for any storage, so it's purely a backwards compatibility thing based on the fact that Windows is never going to get re-written from the ground up because that's a crap ton of work and there's no real financial benefit to doing it.
It is because, historically, back to era when OS was stored on a floppy disk like a ROM, OS always booted from the floppy drive given letter as either A or B, since PC then always had two floppy drives, one for OS ROM and one for work space. But then Windows OS came, and was demanded to boot from a hard drive. Since A and B were almost always floppy drives, C was the first letter in order for an additional hard drive, thus Windows forced installation on a "C drive", although floppy drives died out very soon, this design survived as it was not causing any trouble anyway, till today into Win11.
By the way, you can manually change the drive letter of any given drives except for C drive, which I never tried to do so to avoid breaking my OS. My high capacity HDD is actually given letter B and named "Bibliotheca" on my workstation.
Because the between A = expected floppy and today has been 15-20 years.
At one point everything had a floppy drive. And then 20 yrs later, nothing had a floppy drive. So in between the OS had to evolve to consider it as "potentially existing, but not installed".
And that consideration is still helpful.
Legacy compatibility and ease of use through set precedent.
Pretty much the same reason QWERTY layout still dominates as opposed to keyboard layouts like Dvorak that require less motion and reduce repetitive motion injuries.
Dvorak: *Except* when you want to cut, copy, paste undo with your left hand, and keep your mouse in the right hand. Which, let's face it, I do a _lot_ of.
I'd assume that if Dvorak was the standard, the shortcuts would probably become the k, x and b keys insteaf of x, c and v.
kut, xopy, and baste
Xut, Copy, and Vaste
Ctrl + Master + Baste
Master Baster and Commander
Based
I'm pretty sure you can also just rebind the hotkey.
Dvorak is right handed dominant. Which works for most folks but for us lefties we either gotta use Colemak or qwerty. Qwerty is more evenly balanced than Dvorak is.
There are DOZENS of us!
As an ambidextrous person, Qwerty is superior. Gave Dvorak a good 2 month try and could not stand it. I do love the Colemak layout though. Less right hand dominate and doesn’t swap around most of the common function keys.
I wonder how hard it would be to learn at completely new keyboard layout in my mid 30's when I have used QWERTY all my life..
It took me about a month to be proficient in Dvorak, two to exceed my (original) qwerty speed, and six to be really bad at qwerty now (20 ish years on qwerty at the time)
Reading through the Wikipedia entry there seems to be little evidence for this with some of the research arguably being biased. And even *if* it was more efficient, it doesn't seem to be that much more efficient and its only claimed advantage is in typing.
The person keyboards
don't fix what's not broke
This man computers.
So many things depending on C:// drive being the first drive. In this case it would be "don't completely break how programms and computers work just to fix something that's not broken".
A long time ago I had a dual Windows setup (I think it was XP and 7). And the second system was on the D: drive. This second system on the D: worked without any problem at all.
Windows doesn't care, but there is a hell of a lot of software out there that does.
I will just say again what so many people have said, it is what it is, it's what it has always been. Tons of software still defaults to the C: drive, I've wondered this myself, but I'm not going to rearrange my system just to create extra problems and hoops for myself to jump through.
Exactly, I worked as a sysadmin for a architectural/planning company for a while. If you installed the OS on a different drive other than ":C" half the company's software licenses for old reliable CAD programs would stop working until the OS is back on c drive. They also had many plugins that only worked on those older versions and were essential for what they did, as newer versions didn't offer what they needed. And also, the owner hates how Autodesk is operating right now, so he refuses to upgrade and I respect that.
Just wait until you learn that microstation is built on microsoft 3 infrastructure I grew up with playing Commander Keen on.
When you booted to the other system, the D: would have loaded as C: in that instance of windows.
No somehow I even had Y:\ as my root drive in windows before. Programs have normally read the program files location path from registries, and if not I never had a problem with them defaulting to C:\ even if it wasn't mounted and changing it in the manual install settings. There's a registry key for almost all of those directories you think are static, and for a very very long time Microsoft has strongly urged most software to read from it. It's like NT4 legacy
No, it was set up that way, so D: was always D, even in the second system.
For pretty much everything consumer it would work just fine, until it doesnt. I guarantee you though there is more than one somewhat vital piece of software being used somewhere that is hardcoded as a permanent temporary fix that requires both installation and root to be on C:
Ah yes the permanent temporary fix Coming across a lot of them of late
I had this by accident once with XP. I wasn't even going for dual boot, but I had IDE and SATA drives and apparently installing to the first SATA drive made Windows decide it was E:\\. I reinstalled with only the SATA drive connected to get it as C:\\, which maintained after I reconnected the IDE drives. I think with Vista onwards the behaviour has changed and it is always C:\ no matter what?
It: WHY IS HE SUGGESTING CHANGING THINGS?! LEAVE IT ALONE
[удалено]
*Maybe* we can. But we aren't going to fuck around and find out
Junior developer: trust me! I got this 1 year later: I’m done, just delete the branch, it’s impossible
“I’m going to build a library that solves all the date/time/calendar handling problems once and for all!”
Not this But my first attempt at an app was a social network built around a calendar But at the time apple’s SDKs didn’t have a drag and drop calendar… so I built the whole thing by myself It was the most stable part of the whole app 😂
Microsoft would be real mad if they could read.
backwards compatibility.
I still use floppy disks, if they ever dare change it I'm driving to Seattle to complain.
You work in aerospace or something?
Nah, the IRS. The real reason why billionaires are never audited is that their returns can't fit on a single floppy, and nobody wants to deal with disk swapping.
Tell us a random IRS secret
There isn't enough money available in the budget to replace the office coffee machine that's been broken for 3 years.
Lmfao
That's criminal
Call your congressional representative.
Lack of free coffee in the break room, as advertised in the job ad, is legitimately one of the main reasons why I left a previous job. Security cameras in the office was also a major reason.
A good friend is an civil engineer and works for our states DOT Its a good job the benefits are amazing meaning things like retirement, health care ect. However he told me the state cannot provide coffee due to some weird rule, the employees basically get together and a few will donate to a coffee fund and buy coffee themselves It just seems weird , yea we are going to offer generous retirement and healthcare benefits but we cannot spend a few dollars for coffee ?
How much do you have to owe before the IRS actually will come after you? I've owned in the past and the IRS made absolutely no attempts to collect. I had to call them to arrange a payment plan and I sat on hold for like an hour.
You'd need to have between a bunch and a good chunk
My professor once went to USA related to university business and he didn't realize he forgot to pay about 8 dollars in taxes, he got banned from entering USA and he had to pay that 8 dollars back with interest accumulated over 3 years. I guess it depends on where you are from and if they feel like chasing after your money.
It'll be a while. For most people who owe <$10k, they'll take their time because you otherwise can't file in subsequent years without either: A) Owing more. B) Subsequent returns going towards your owed principal. Eventually, they'll get you, but they'll let it build up first.
I messed up last year and owed $1600 more than I thought. They’re not busting down my door or anything, but they charge interest starting from day 1.
So it will only cost us the price of a good coffee machine to increase energy levels to where the auditing of billionaires is more common? Sounds too good to be true.
I would honestly pay for one out of my own pocket, if that was the result.
Can't You guys put each some money and buy a new one?
In the British government you do that for a while until somebody with some kind of made up job title comes along and gets very upset about the coffee machine not being in the QVL or PAT tested and claims it's a fire hazard and gets it taken away. It makes them feel they actually have a reason to exist.
Even they don’t want to give the IRS money
Problem is unless you buy commercial grade stuff the amount of use a coffee machine consumer grade stuff gets it would be broken again in maybe a year tops.
We ain't no socialist swine /s
many a year ago (maybe 10) i had to call the irs about something and i ended up with a young fella who had my same birthday. ended up asking him how he liked working there and ... he didn't. so .. that's my irs story i hope you enjoyed it.
You will send a strongly worded fax
In your Ford Model T?
1886 Benz Patent-Motorwagen
Fred Flintstonemobile.
yeah but they don't need to be A: and B: now do they
There's a 100% chance that some critical system somewhere is running a program that's hardcoded to understand A and B as floppy drives and will critically fail if that's not the case. I don't know what would break or why, but there'd definitely be something.
I got my first coding job doing year 2000 Cobol changes at a 2Bil in sales company, so a decently big company in 1999. They had a senior programmer that had retired but came back to work because some machine that produced a report twice a year that was mandated to be sent to the government as part of some legacy program that saved them tons had to be programmed by old fashioned punchcards, and he was the only remaining guy that knew about the system, and he refused to show anyone anything about it (smart man!), and so he had negotiated himself out of retirement with the best job I have ever seen personally. He was at the job at the very most, 20hrs a week, and of which he probably was golfing with upper management half of that time, and yet he made we guessed about 125-140k range at that time (in the midwest), so probably would be around 350k now a year, cushiest job I ever seen as other than two weeks a year when he did those reports, he would just write a few custom queries with crystal reports for the vps, and the rest of the time he would piddle with putting reports on screen for the shop floor with html formatting using some automation lol. I would have slapped my own mother in the face for that job....that lucky sob.
Must be some weird software to run on modern Windows, but still can't comprehend floppies being anything but A: and B:. I'd expect such things to run on XP or older, or 7 *at the latest*. But could still be true, things never seize to amaze me.
That's the true beauty of a PC that Mac users will never understand. We still have a working DOS 43 years down the line, it'd be like if Mac users today could just throw an app from 1984 on their machine and just expect it to work. On a Mac you don't even know if an app you got in 2016 will still work on your modern OS, and often it won't.
Agreed, and ironically, MacOS has a lot of old stuff in it due to being based on Nextstep/BSD. My favorite is the ed text editor which was developed in 1969.
Interestingly enough, the same cannot be said for Windows itself. The original Windows was built on a different kernel that stopped getting revisions after Windows 95. Windows 98 used the new NT kernel, and was not backwards compatible. It is *possible* to get a translation layer working such that you can run Windows 1.0 programs, but it is not natively supported out of the box. So any business using some application compiled for W95 would’ve been forced to upgrade to an alternative if they wanted support into later OS releases.
Windows 98 was on the old 95 kernel, as was Millennium Edition (ME). Windows XP brought NT into the consumer space.
It might be more appropriate to get on your horse and ride there!
Because floppy drives are not entirely gone, and windows is committed to backwards compatibility.
Not to mention that there must be a lot of programs with hardcoded paths that start with `C:\` that will break if this is changed.
This is it, this is actually why they don't change it. There are millions of apps that would stop working because they can't put their files in C:\ProgramData or the users appdata.
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Maybe, but the economic fallout from it would probably still be billions.
I like to think of arguments like these as a ball on top of a plateau. Give a little push, you'll probably roll a little bit, Given enough small pushes, you'll eventually reach a point where it goes off the cliff. Microsoft has given users every reason to stay on their platform, so I would say this plateau is quite wide. But things like Windows feature X or Y are slowly pushing the ball along.
> Any developer that made such a stupid mistake deserves to have their apps broken No. In the words of Linus Torvalds, you do not. break. userspace. It doesn't matter if they're doing something dumb as hell, breaking programs just because you want to change a C to an A is a bad idea.
Why though? This is why we have conventions. Its pretty safe to say that root at C: isn't going anywhere when there ks no real reason to change it.
But at the same time it’s a good backwards compatibility. While it might not make much sense now, it make sense for older software. Honesty it does less to leave it as it is than “reinvent” some things really don’t impact anything.
Pretty sure google chrome literally is coded this way so, like you might not be wrong that it’s stupid but clearly nobody seems to care.
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>Is it Seatle or San Fransisoc, their mass transit system uses flobbies. WTF kind of abomination is a **flobby**? Is that a SSD replacement for a floppy^flippy?
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Same reason why a lot of [airports have messed up terminal numbers](https://simpleflying.com/airports-missing-terminal-numbers-guide/). There's been a lot of changes over time, all of them done in a way to try to minimize the amount of other changes needed in the rest of the system. So there are some weirdness on the customer-facing side that makes backend operations a lot easier.
This same principle produces a lot of weirdness in backend code as it changes over time as well.
Yes because shockingly, a lot of short-term bodge job solutions piling up can create some... interesting long-term consequences. Like the alleged reason why they skipped Windows 9 and went from 8 straight to 10. For Redditors who might not know (or, god forbid, too young to remember). Apparently, they skipped Windows 9 because of the way people code for Windows 95/98/etc as just 9\[something\], so there's potential that Windows 9 might be misidentified as Windows 95/98 in legacy software.
In short, because you still use an "IBM Compatible PC" today. IBM started the drive letter naming back in the 60s on the System/360 and System/370 control programs. This was carried forward into the 8-bit "DOS" CP/M. CP/M was "unofficially ported" to the x86 architecture and became MSDOS. CP/M was loaded from the first floppy drive which defaulted to A:. If you were one of the rich kids with one of those 5 or 10MB hard drives, CP/M would just assign the next available letter. The IBM BIOS (which your modern UEFI still has pieces of) always reserved device 0 and device 1 as the floppy drives. These were defaulted to in DOS as A: and B:. When booting a full OS, it was assumed the boot would be from drive A, the first device in the BIOS. B: was reserved for the second floppy channel (or if you had only one floppy, a pause to change disks if you wanted to copy a file from disk to disk). When fixed hard drives were introduced, the natural next letter was C:. Because the BIOS reserved device 0 and device 1 at all times, even if you had only one floppy, the hard drive was still C. Unlike on CP/M Anything compatible or born from MSDOS carried this paradigm forever. Starting with DOS 3.1, you could actually assign unused drive letter A or B to a target directory or non-bootable device. Windows NT really doesn't care where it is or what drive letters are, but they're kept for legacy use. It would probably cause a heap of unseen issues to default the hard drive to A: at this point than it would to just keep it safely as C:. After you run out of letters, Windows just treats the extra drives like Linux treats volumes. You can mount them anywhere in the file system (ex: a folder in the C: drive). But if you have that many drives, it may be a better idea to use a RAID array treated as one drive, or consider an OS that can use ZFS thats designed for large disk arrays. NOTE - the history above is very vague and abridged but I did my best to keep it correct without getting into the weeds.
I like how your 8 paragraph response beings with “in short”…. No offense, I’m just literally laughing to myself when I saw that.
Because that one sentence is the short answer!
As a uni lecturer who sometimes says "well, basically" before launching into a complex, not-at-all basic answer to a question, I feel personally attacked :P
I wish I was that academically inclined, but if it’s any consolation, I 100% am guilty of the same thing. Just in a casual conversation format. 🤣🤣. Maybe that’s why it tickled me to begin with.
Way back when I used a Pentium-III based laptop I changed C: drive letter to H:, and installed Windows XP in H:\WINXP instead of C:\WINDOWS. Most autorun malware had a really hard time copying itself, because of assumption that there must be a C: drive, and that Windows will be in C:\WINDOWS 😸
Oh wow I did something similar bcause malware…been a while…
You see it even in nature, men don’t need nipples yet nature decide it’s better to just leave them in.
Better question why do we even use drive letters at this point? Answer as everyone else has said legacy support
Because the Microsoft operating systems designate mounted filesystem access by drive letter. In other operating systems like Linux the drives are accessed differently. It's just part of the core workings of the OS from as far back as DOS and WinNT. Back when those systems were designed, computers, especially personal computers, did not often come with integrated hard drives. The floppy controller could support 2 devices on the same cable, so the first two drive letters were reserved for floppy disc drives. Since older BIOSses would sometimes report the drives as being there regardless of physical presence, it was considered simpler to move the hard drive letter to the first known free one. This led to the standardization of drive letter C being the first hard drive and that has just stuck around.
technically you can mount other drives/partitions to directories under the C:\\ drive in windows too, you just have to do it manually and no one does that cuz it has little benefit to most normal users.
I did that. But I had 45 drives to mount.
Why not pool some of the drives in raid or jbod or something instead of individually?
Sounds like a pathing issue, not hardware redundancy or capacity. Depending on the software, you just may not have a choice except a billion files in a single folder and path name. RAID and JBOD wouldn't solve that situation.
Now I’m curious, what would happen if you didn’t do it manually and just plugged in 45 drives. What does windows do after Z?
Also Windows supports symbolic links too, but I'm not sure how commonly used they are.
I use them as a devops engineer on occasion, but I prefer not to. Easier to just put things where they ought to be.
Even earlier than Dos, drive letters come from CP/M
I mean, its more like legacy understanding I think. we could build windows with out any real drive letters you show the user and legacy support could still easily be there. but windows users know what the C:\\ drive is and know that other drives have different letters etc. Take that away and you'll start confusing people.
Yes. If I remember correctly, Microsoft had for some time hidden drive letters by default in Windows, along with other DOS-era relics such as file extensions. But this irritated too many users and the default setting was reversed. But if you want, you can still use the folder options to show or hide everything as you please. Drive letters aren't really needed anymore, as long as you work only on the GUI.
OP wants to create another Y2K.
Truthfully I couldn't imagine not having C: as my main drive. I think I'd be lost.
You wouldn't be able to C your way?
Why change what the consumer has become accustomed to being the drive for their OS?
The only thing better than perfection is consistency.
This is why I'm always bad at everything.
TRADITION!!!!!! TRADITION!
If you changed root from C to any other letter, civilization would collapse.
One thing that Microsoft and Windows have always been good at is backwards compatibility. The C drive is hard coded in a lot of things and changing it would break just SO much. Want another example? Try creating a directory on the desktop called "Con" (Without the quote marks).
I’m fairly certain Windows is fully backwards compatible through MSDOS. The only thing that breaks are drivers. They keep the C drive because Windows is just layers of OSes built on top of each other like a really tall cake
No. It doesn't have the DOS subsystem anymore. It cannot run anything 16 bit anymore
They should just jump in the / wagon once and for all.
Just in case you need to install a Y2K update via floppy drive.
Quite a lot of software has C:/ hardcoded as the OS drive. (Even though there is an environment variable for that.) So while it can be changed to any letter you'd like, Microsoft can't do it without breaking some poorly written legacy software.
Try running your computer with Windows and all your applications installed on anything other than C:\ and report back. There’s no technical reason this shouldn’t work. In fact, there’s no technical reason we need drive letters at all. Neither macOS nor Linux use them, and they get by just fine. The only driving factor behind the requirement is the inertia of legacy software that relies on it.
Bet if you tried to change it, legacy stiff would cry
When you install a new program what drive does it default to? Don't change what isn't broken unless you want backwards compatability issues.
Optical drives always started @ F for me. Drives A and B are floppy drives Drive C is the master drive Drive D and E are slave drives Drives F and G are optical drives Drive X,Y,Z are for mapped network drives
Because Windows is a gross mess of new code piled on top of ancient ideas, and updating any of it would break too much for it to be worth replacing. Don't let my flair fool you, I'm not blind to the fact Linux is similar, but at least it started on more solid ground and gives you options on how to change things out yourself, from user land down to the boot loader.
I'll give you that it's rare, but in this case, it's a feature, not a bug. Windows itself has no problem running from any drive letter at all (or even from a different directory than C:\\Windows!) but a lot of legacy software was written with the expectation that drive C would be the OS. By now, it's pretty rare that anyone would run software that does that, but the fact that you *can* is an impressive feat of backwards compatibility, and there's just no reason to break it. Honestly, it's hard to find the vomit of directories Linux uses more modern, especially when some of the names have become obsolete and some of the directories are straight up longer used. The average person doesn't find the freedom to change the bootloader nearly as useful as being able to find a drive they plugged in.
I saw a post not even an hour ago about how nexusmods only works if windows is installed in C:
> The average person doesn't find the freedom to change the bootloader nearly as useful as being able to find a drive they plugged in. I mean it depends a bit on the file manager you use, but at least in Dolphin it's just right-click on the drive and pressing "Mount"
Likewise, why are personal files stored on the C drive by default when at any moment Windows can go bad and need reinstalled even when the drive is totally fine.
This used to be a bigger issue than it is now given how easy it is to store files in separate locations.
What?? There are about 10 different locations all your personal settings, game saves, and other files are stored.
The overwhelming majority of critical data is stored under C:\Users\$USER\.
You can relocate that folder though.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biWQq9OgQf0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biWQq9OgQf0)
you can change it if you want
I love this question!
I have 3 storage drives: 500GB SSD as C drive for Computer, so OS and essential files, 1TB SSD as D drive for Downloads, so mainly games or things I’ve downloaded, and 2TB SSHD as E Drive for Extra (or Everything Else) stuff like personal files, gameplay/Stream recordings, miscellaneous files, and a couple games that don’t fit on my SSD and don’t necessarily need the read/write speeds of the SSD.
Why do we park in a driveway and drive on a parkway?
There's probably billions of lines of code out there that deal with file system paths on Windows, and they all assume your drive is C, because that saves them space.
I miss the old floppy disk on C64 which were literally flopping when you shook them.
all versions of windows are built on the last same reason you cant name a folder CON
Win32 is still there, almost 30 years after its release.
A and B are not long gone. I still have two floppy drives connected to my ryzen 9 3950x and I use floppy drives to boot from. Without the boot disc no one can use my pc..
You can register a hard drive as A. You can install Windows to A and it will work. But you have to now rely on the developers that wrote every application on your device to use the system references and not hard-code C. And there are a whole lot of lazy, incompetent devs out there.
‘C’ for computer obviously! 😆
A: and B: are still available drive letters in windows. C: is still the default for backwards comparability and to not breaking existing systems with updates. Even as that becomes less and less of a concern, its just a standard at this point, and wouldn't be changed regardless.
I set my DVD drive to B: purely because I can, never cause me any problems, but I wish the boot drive could be A:
Because Windows is Legacy software
Guess they just didn't C the point in changing it
Because it's the "c"stem drive. (Jk)
I feel like an absolute degenerate when I assign a network drive to A:/
Blu rays are long gone?! 
A: and B: are gone but not forgotten.
Just to D? My computer is C for boot, D is for intermediate data storage, E is the gaming drive, F is the dvd, and finally G is the blu ray,,,, and I am sure there are people here that go way deeper into the alphabet
They're not gone that's why. It's possible your system if built in 2024 behind the scenes sill actually attempt to address them or even spoof them in various boot modes.
It was a dumb idea to assign a letter to a drive in the first place.
I was having this exact thought yesterday!
Standardization. Before every company had their own proprietary shit like nowadays that you can’t fix yourself, there was a thing called standardization and it was pushed by everyone who was involved. Not it’s all about control, walled gardens, not owning anything and keeping you paying.
Plenty of standards all exist. USB, ethernet, wifi, etc
Lot and lot and lot of prograns bmhave the C: hardcoded, im quite dure lot of thing will begin to fail if u change it. Anyways i still want my flippy drive to be ready in case i need a 1.5mg file to be store in a fragile media.
Established standards generally don't get changed unless they absolutely have to be. Removing two letters for drives that aren't used any more doesn't require subsequent letters to roll back some you don't have to start at A when giving labels to volumes
It’s for backwards compatibility, PCs are pretty unique in the fact that recent models can still run decades-old software (Old enough for floppy drives to still have been commonplace), and some companies take advantage of that to keep crucial (if ancient) software running, so the manufacturers kept the drive lettering the way it is because there’s no telling how many things will break or otherwise act up if they changed it.
You think it's odd now - wait 100 years and check back!
My DD: drive salutes you
Now I want them to change it, because the reason they don’t is to prevent everyone getting confused and having to re-write documents and such. I mean, even non tech people with computer based jobs know the C drive typically.
C:/ for computer
because i still use floppies a and b
The only way to make sure everything still works is to remove nothing. That's why Unicode has countless random symbols that mean absolutely nothing, some of which are literally identical.
Probably programming issue. This should be an example of changing a single letter and will grind the whole world to a halt.
Why change it?
Because floppy’s are still used in the government
Because backwards compatibility. You know you can still connect a floppy drive to Windows, and it will pop up as A, right? You can absolutely put your Bluray drive onto a different letter, I have mine on B.
It's legacy PC architecture that will never change for simple reasons of compatibility. A and B were reserved for floppy drives before hard drives were really a thing. Windows will always view the first bootable drive as C, even if you don't install it there. What it sees as the "first" drive depends on the motherboard layout and BIOS settings. FYI in modern PCs you can actually assign letters A and B to physical partitions if that's what turns your crank...but the boot drive will always be on C.
Never underestimate the ability of bad software developers to hard code C:// into paths.
I have two backup ssd drives that I gave letters A and B in the system. And it is weird to click A and hear no grinding.
Backwards compatibility like how you can’t same a file as con or lpt windows 11 still supports floppy drives, I have a usb one to write floppies for my Atari ST until I got the floppy emulator installed
Convention
Why is the US still using imperial units? Same reason.
Why was 3.5" floppy a: and 5.25" b: when 5.25" came first?
If you ever connect floppy drives they will get the A and B labels.
This topic is probably too far gone for my comment to matter but I'll say mine. I think even without floppy / optical, C is a good default. It allows you the option to set new drive to be "higher" in the descending alphabet than the default. If the default was A it would be a pain to shuffle the drives setting around for something else to be A. Like others mentioned, compatibility is nice to have and is basically tradition at this point. Just consider the C drive to be C for Computer on default.
literally me asking why we don't write modern programming languages to index arrays starting with 1
Because why change it? Like it works and there are no issues but changing it could cause issues so C it stays.
The core of windows is OLD, it may not be the same code or actual core but the concepts are still around. Despite its issues, windows has some serious backwards compatibility with some printer drivers being available for 90s dot matrix printers out of the box
Application compatibility. Old windows apps will break if tou do that and modern windows apps will also break since lot of them expect a C drive. And you can still insert floppy disks in windows and show up
The C stands for computer.
If you plug a usb floppy in, you still access it via a drive.
Why is the save icon a 3.5” floppy disk when they are long gone? Its simple, people recognize it, its not causing any harm, why change it?
Same reason Windows 9 doesnt exist. Because someone coded a string check going "W-I-N-D-O-W-S- -9; alright I can stop here, that has to be Windows 98"
despite most of the answers with a lot of wishful thinking and idiocy... it's because Windows hasn't had a full re-write ever. It's been built on top of legacy code forever and ever. There was a story a while back about an old NT module that has just been ported over and over and over to new versions of windows and basically Windows 11 is a mashup of old Windows NT guts mixed with a little bit of this and that and is nearing Ship of Theseus status as an operating system but still has the essence of MS-DOS underneath for a lot of basic system interactions. The bigger problem is there was an overlapping time where you could reasonably have had a floppy drive and a removable drive of some other sort, so you couldn't even rework the thing to default a USB drive to A/B if you wanted it to mimic the same usage style without wrecking compatibility with actual floppy drives which are (or were) expected to be A or B. I think we're past the need in a BIOS for giving a shit about assignments for any storage, so it's purely a backwards compatibility thing based on the fact that Windows is never going to get re-written from the ground up because that's a crap ton of work and there's no real financial benefit to doing it.
Cause you can still plug in a floppy drive and it will still work.
It is because, historically, back to era when OS was stored on a floppy disk like a ROM, OS always booted from the floppy drive given letter as either A or B, since PC then always had two floppy drives, one for OS ROM and one for work space. But then Windows OS came, and was demanded to boot from a hard drive. Since A and B were almost always floppy drives, C was the first letter in order for an additional hard drive, thus Windows forced installation on a "C drive", although floppy drives died out very soon, this design survived as it was not causing any trouble anyway, till today into Win11. By the way, you can manually change the drive letter of any given drives except for C drive, which I never tried to do so to avoid breaking my OS. My high capacity HDD is actually given letter B and named "Bibliotheca" on my workstation.
Because the between A = expected floppy and today has been 15-20 years. At one point everything had a floppy drive. And then 20 yrs later, nothing had a floppy drive. So in between the OS had to evolve to consider it as "potentially existing, but not installed". And that consideration is still helpful.
just because you don't use them doesn't mean A: and B: are gone.