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Ancient History Lesson: Back in the days when hardware was much more expensive than it is today, many people could only afford only one floppy disc drive on their systems.  I don't know how it worked, but if you only had one floppy drive installed, DOS would recognize it as both drive a: and drive b:.  When you entered the command diskcopy a: b: (or just plain copy a:*.* b DOS would read as much from the source disc into memory as would fit, then prompt you to insert the target blank disc into b: (which you would do by taking the source disc out of the drive (a and replacing it with the target disc (now considered b and copy the data from memory onto the disc.  Depending on how much data was on the disc and how much memory you had in your system, you might have had to swap discs in and out two or more times.

PS:  diskcopy a: a: (or copy a:*.* a probably wouldn't have worked.  I just don't remember a lot from those good old days.

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Quoting kdh1949:

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Ancient History Lesson: Back in the days when hardware was much more expensive than it is today, many people could only afford only one floppy disc drive on their systems.  I don't know how it worked, but if you only had one floppy drive installed, DOS would recognize it as both drive a: and drive b:.

Must have been before the 90s, because my MS-DOS 5 on my 286 did never such a thing and I also had only one floppy disc drive.

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[...] It was an original PC with a 4.77Mhz 8088 and only 512k of ram!