>>7
Got a 5 1/4 drive I pulled from an old 386. Have 10 disks as well. Still works.
>>1
Listen to 2. I'm only answering your question to prove that I'm an EXPERT OLDFAG.
It's because of compatibility with DOS, which stole this concept from CP/M. CP/M would assign each disk drive a drive letter, starting with A:. As DOS wanted to basically be a 16-bit CP/M with a better filesystem (FAT), it copied almost everything from CP/M including this.
Now, if you had only one floppy drive, DOS would let you refer to it as both A: and B:. If a program refered to drive B:, it would tell you to insert the proper disk in A: and use the A: drive. In that way programs that were written to expect 2 floppy drives could still work with one. Because back then FDDs were like $300-$400.
So, even a system with 1 floppy drive had an A: and B: drive. (The B: drive thing might not hold true for the very early DOS versions... I can't remember exactly)
So, when hard drives became all the raeg in '84, '85, they took the next drive letter, which, unless you had NO floppy drives which could not be possible (the BIOS would always assume one was present even if it wasn't connected, I think), it would always be C:. It would be D:, E:, etc. if you had 3 or 4 floppies, but most people didn't have more than 2.
Windows then came along, and always put the hard drive as C:. I don't think you can use more than 2 floppies under any version of Windows 95 onward. You defintely could under DOS.
And everyone lived happily ever after.