David Newton

From the Book of Disk, Chapter 3 In the beginning there were the First Drives, and their names were A: and B:, and they were the floppies. They were not elegant. They were thin, fragile, and demanded constant sacrifice disk swaps, write protect tabs, the ritual of “please insert the disk labeled” performed under fluorescent lights. To them the early machines bent the knee, for without them there was no boot, no data, no word processor. Then came the hard drive, and it was called C:, for it arrived third. It did not ask to be first. It merely sat in the bay and spun, and the people saw that it was good, and that it held far more than any floppy, and that it did not rattle when you walked too fast. So they installed the operating system upon it, and called it the system drive, and the old gods were not cast down but simply… left in the BIOS, still reserved, still acknowledged in the table of letters, though no one invoked them anymore. And Microsoft looked upon the generations that followed, who had never known the click of a 5.25-inch disk or the careful alignment of a 3.5, and it said: The children must not be shown the old gods. For if the new ones learned that A: and B: once ruled, they might ask why the alphabet begins elsewhere. They might attempt to summon the floppies by force, or rename the world so that C: was no longer first. And the installers would break, and the paths would fracture, and the registry would weep. So the letters remain sealed, A: and B: still written in the book but never spoken aloud by the system, while C: stands in the open as if it had always been the beginning. Thus it is written, and thus it remains; the hard drive is C:, and the old gods sleep in the assignment table, undisturbed, so that the children may believe the world has always started with the letter that came third.