Some thoughts from Eugene Volokh. I didn’t know that people were confused on this issue. But it is irritating that Microsoft screwed things up with DOS (as they did many other things).
3 thoughts on “Backslash”
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Some thoughts from Eugene Volokh. I didn’t know that people were confused on this issue. But it is irritating that Microsoft screwed things up with DOS (as they did many other things).
Comments are closed.
MS did worse. They insisted on keeping the forward-slash-as-switch-delimiter popular in the DEC operating system world instead of as the pathname. A lot of us tried to get them to add pathnames after DOS 1, but they did it wrong, and then compounded it in their flagship OS at the time, Xenix. Remember that one? They ended up modifying the heck out of it just to change it to use backslashes in pathnames. They could have solved the issue simply, but adding the dash as a switch character, perhaps via two different COMMAND.COM binaries, one legacy and one “next-gen”. This was in the era when MS wasn’t trying to kill off UNIX, they were trying to be “the” x86 UNIX vendor, so this was done out of stupidity. Imagine what the world would be like if Microsoft apps ran on Xenix (as they were intended), and pathnames were clean in either OS. Kind of like John Sculley’s idiotic choice of Mac OS System 6 instead of A/UX 4 as the operating system for the Mac II. UNIX ported readily in either case, and the suits at both places made “business decisions” that reflected short-term thinking.
You can certainly claim it’s “stupidity” if you want, but Microsoft prefers the term “backward compatibility.” You know, the thing Apple doesn’t really believe in.
…And of course the preferences of IBM at the time had nothing to do with it.
You can find an entertaining reminiscence at Why is the DOS path character “\”?.
But, hey, it’s fun to beat on MicroSoft, right? After all, they’re the greatest cause of world misery, after the Democratic Party, no?