For that brief period in the mid-'90s I owned a PC with twin 3½" floppy drives. I never really used the second one, but I enjoyed the novelty and the fact that all my drive letters were in use. I also saw a handful of computers with both 3½" and 5¼" drives in some of the university PC labs. I don’t think I ever saw anyone use the 5¼" slot of any of them, but the 3½" floppy drives got a decent amount of use.
Fun fact though: You could still use B: in DOS commands even if you only had an A: drive. The system would prompt you to switch disks as and when A: was about to pretend to be B: and then switch back afterwards.
My computer at home had a single floppy (and two 10MB hard drives C: and D:), but the one at the school used for MIDI was an actual IBM PC with two drives. We’d boot up on A: and save our projects on B:. :)
The b: drive was usually used to speed up a disk copy, especially to multiple copies, it was way faster than swapping out the disks. Remember that sometimes the whole contents of a disk didn’t fit in available memory. There was a lot of disk swapping.
You could also just keep the msdos disk in a: and execute software from b:
Also sometimes a command required reading from the msdos disk. It was handy to have the boot disk always available.
I don’t recall using any software that specifically required two drives, but no doubt it existed.
I experienced a time period where 3.5" discs coexisted with harddrives, but I’ve never seen a system where B: is actually used…
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For that brief period in the mid-'90s I owned a PC with twin 3½" floppy drives. I never really used the second one, but I enjoyed the novelty and the fact that all my drive letters were in use. I also saw a handful of computers with both 3½" and 5¼" drives in some of the university PC labs. I don’t think I ever saw anyone use the 5¼" slot of any of them, but the 3½" floppy drives got a decent amount of use.
Fun fact though: You could still use B: in DOS commands even if you only had an A: drive. The system would prompt you to switch disks as and when A: was about to pretend to be B: and then switch back afterwards.
My computer at home had a single floppy (and two 10MB hard drives C: and D:), but the one at the school used for MIDI was an actual IBM PC with two drives. We’d boot up on A: and save our projects on B:. :)
I had one, A: is where the CP/M boot disc lived and B: was for all the actual stuff.
The b: drive was usually used to speed up a disk copy, especially to multiple copies, it was way faster than swapping out the disks. Remember that sometimes the whole contents of a disk didn’t fit in available memory. There was a lot of disk swapping.
You could also just keep the msdos disk in a: and execute software from b: Also sometimes a command required reading from the msdos disk. It was handy to have the boot disk always available.
I don’t recall using any software that specifically required two drives, but no doubt it existed.
I had an 8086 with a 5.25 and a 3.5”. You could always change their assignments in the bios if you wanted
I’ve had both. Also you could use b: as a substitute for a: if you had only one drrive. It would then ask you yo insert a disk before accessing