[Info-vax] SET DEFAULT iterative logical name translation

[Lawrence D’Oliveiro]

On Wednesday, October 27, 2021 at 2:41:29 AM UTC+13, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> On 10/26/2021 2:17 AM, Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote: 
>
>> Whereas Microsoft still seem to believe that 26 drive letters ought to be enough
>> for anybody.
>
> The English language decided on 26 letters. 

But the idea to only use one letter to identify a drive came from Gary Kildall with CP/M. Which, I understand, he cross-developed on a DEC PDP-10 running TOPS-10, which had multicharacter names for both disk and non-disk devices. (As did every subsequent DEC OS.)

Then Microsoft carried over the same limitation with MS-DOS for some reason, even though that was ostensibly running on “16-bit” hardware by now, not subject to the same memory limitations as the old “8-bit” machines.

> The last Windows server version that required a unique drive letter per 
> disk was NT 4.0 Server (released 1996, end of support 2002/2004). All 
> newer Windows versions (2003, 2008, 2008R2, 2012, 2012R2, 2016, 2019 
> and 2022) supports volume mount points. 

Which are too fiddly for ordinary people to use, can cause incompatibilities with some software, are tricky to set up for things like USB sticks or network shares, etc, etc.