>> Maybe that's because on DOS/Windows hard drives came along before
>> multi-tasking? So you never got the situation where you were swapping
>> floppies around to do several things at once in a multi-tasking
>> environment. In that situation it's very useful for the OS/app to know
>> which disc to use, rather than just which drive to use (otherwise you
>> end up saving your word processor document to your printer driver disc
>> and then can't find the latest version the next day).
>
> This sounds like a "been there, done that".

Nope, I never went near a DOS/Windows machine until Windows 95 when hard 
drives were standard. When I first got my Acorn it only had 1MB RAM and 
no hard drive, so everything (apart from the OS which was in ROM) was on 
floppies. If you needed to edit a spreadsheet, create a chart and put it 
in a desktop publishing document then print it out (as was quite common 
for school homework), you'd need to be using at least 3 or 4 different 
discs and then it's important you saved all the stuff on the right disc! 
I have no idea how DOS/Windows handled such situations before everyone 
had hard drives.

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