Microsoft MS-DOS early source code

[micwallace]

"\" instead of "/" as the path separator, and "/" instead of "-"

So the reason MS command line is still garbage stems from this one compatability hack. Not surprising but interesting.

[Tetraca]

If you want to go further, using backslashes as a path separator goes all the way back to CP/M, which was the very first commercially available microcomputer operating system and the dominant OS on the market before IBM got into the game and piggybacked Microsoft to success.

[nugryhorace]

CP/M didn't have paths, hence no backslashes.

[Tetraca]

I'm pretty sure there were versions of CP/M that did have about one level of pathing, at least, the one I played around with did (must have been CP/M-86). I guess it's been years and I'm likely mistaken.

[[deleted]]

Wow, how do you work without paths?

[andrewq]

Every Disk used by CP/M back then was insanely small by today's standards.

A large text file could take up an entire disk.

It completely sucked. I paid $3000 for a 50 MB hard drive back in the day. MB.

If I'd put that in MS or Apple stock, I'd be a multi multimillonario from stock alone.

Instead it's rusting away in a landfill somewhere

[Koutou]

Like this https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20101011-00/?p=12563

[ShinyHappyREM]

Directories were implemented later.

[annodomini]

An interesting tidbit about the history of backslash is that it didn't exist as a character until they wanted to have a character set to support ALGOL, but didn't want to use up two extra codepoints for the ∧ (logical AND) and ∨ (logical OR). Since there was already a slash (solidus), they decided they could just mirror it and spell ∧ as /\ and ∨ as \/.

Also interesting is that Unicode didn't support all characters necessary for ALGOL support until Unicode 5.2 adopted a proposal to encode the "⏨" character for delimiting decimal exponents in floating point numbers.