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Comment by erikstarck | Hacker News Reader

Quite fascinating how some design decisions tend to stick due to technical or other reasons. We will probably still run Windows 2020 on the C-drive. Sometimes the reason is backwards compatiblity, other times it's something that requires a huge redesign of an entire system.

But, most of the time I think it's because people simply think that this is the way things are supposed to be. One example is how long it took before Auto-ISO became an option on DSLRs.

In all cases there are opportunities for a startup to be disruptive. So, keep looking for those C-drives!

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A massive pile of legacy Windows stuff probably assumes C: is the boot volume.

Windows has always had extensive backward compatibility, even if it requires tweaking to run 9x programs on XP and up. I often wonder how much better Windows could be if Microsoft were to choose to repeat OS X's innovation, which was almost completely severing backward compatibility.

>"A massive pile of legacy Windows stuff probably assumes C: is the boot volume."

Seeing as Windows has been bootable from removable drives and over networks for a long time, I sincerely doubt it.

When you read it as 'a massive pile of legacy Windows applications', which is reasonable, it's not a stretch to assume that many applications written in the last 20 years assume that the OS is on a harddisk, and on C: for that matter.

Prior to Windows 95 the preponderance of Windows programs were 16bit. Seeing as 16bit programs are not compatible with recent versions of Windows one can be reasonably assured that they are not in that vast pool of legacy applications.

Hand in hand with 32bit Windows came the registry, which is where most applications stored configuration information until relatively recent times.

To the best of my recollection, I have not seen an application or utility hard coded to C: since Windows 95. But I would be interested to learn of the actual examples which support your assumptions.

Most code was written for internal systems. So even if you don't encounter them there are plenty of hard coded paths including drive letter in plenty of systems.

I haven't used windows since 98SE, but I learned my lesson and have recommended all family members put programs in the default locations.

I used to have Windows on C:, Program Files on D: and My Documents on E:. Everything broke, to an approximation.

32-bit Windows 7 runs 16-bit programs just fine.

You've [luckily] never seen internally written software then. I see stuff referencing hardcoded paths to "C:\winnt\system32\" dlls all the time.

Hard coded paths are possible with any operating system, including OSX which was mentioned in the post to which I responded. And when dealing with it, assigning C: to the bootable drive is a feature of a particular implementation, not a legacy of the Operating System. So far as I am aware, no part of recent Windows versions are required to be installed on C:

Even if writing code to require it is trivial.

Many games and apps may run on other than the C: drive, but odd things are broken - configuration changes don't stick, temp files fail to be written etc.

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