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    Although it's not the default behaviour, with NTFS file systems Windows can also mount all your storage under a single root: technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc753321.aspx howtogeek.com/98195/… serverfault.com/questions/24400/… Commented Oct 8, 2013 at 16:54
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    It seems that the relevant part is that MS-DOS 1.0 was floppy-based. On such a system, (a) it was important to know which physical disk your files were on, and (b) A: and B: was a decent convention for distinguishing between your floppy drives if you had two of them. When hard drive support was added in MS-DOS 2.0, the drive C: designation allowed backwards-compatibility by treating the HD as one BIG floppy. Commented Oct 9, 2013 at 5:03
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    Actually, initially CP/M was designed to run in 16, not 64, KB of RAM. The 64 KB figure is probably to allow applications some breathing room; while the command processor (CCP) was overwritten and reloaded if necessary, BIOS and BDOS were memory resident at all times. Yep, that's where BIOS comes from - IBM did not come up with the term! See Wikipedia CP/M: Hardware model and Components of the operating system. Keep in mind that 16 KB is only about three densly written pages (70 lines × 80 chararcters/line × 3 pages = 16800 bytes). Commented Oct 9, 2013 at 11:31