Yeah, so was this person who submitted the question to Ask Yahoo!
The short and simple answer:
The answer goes back to the glory days of floppy discs and DOS. The early DOS operating system designated two drives, A and B, strictly for floppy drives. Why? Because many early computers didn’t have native hard drives — they booted from Drive A, and ran applications from Drive B.
Later, as computers came with hard drives, the second floppy drive became a useless appendage — the computer equivalent of an appendix. To avoid confusion during the evolutionary window when computers with new hard drives coexisted beside computers with two floppies, the hard drives were given the “C” slot.
So there you have it.
This is why I map my flash drive to B at work where I have a gazillion network drives.
You could also say copy a: b: to duplicate disks on systems with only one floppy drive. It would take it in turns to be a: then prompt for the disk to be known as b:
I kept two floppis in all of my systems up until about 5 years ago mainly just because I liked being able to dupe a floppy without swapping… LOL.
I always thought that A: was the 3 1/2 inch floppy drive and B: was the 5 1/4 inch drive (remember those :).
I used to own a computer that required two floppy drives.. One to boot, one to load the operating system off. Wow, I feel old.
I have a small home network and always designate a network drive to be “B:\” in order to fill up the slot. It works, and, unlike a second floppy drive, doesn’t crash the computer (it did crash when I tried plugging in a USB floppy drive as well as the internal one).