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Indeed! Try writing a Windows file system driver sometime; I hear it's truly a lovely experience. The other irony is that the HP48 graphing calculator, origina
by gcv 15y ago
Indeed! Try writing a Windows file system driver sometime; I hear it's truly a lovely experience.
The other irony is that the HP48 graphing calculator, originally introduced in 1990, had a user-facing filesystem with full support for long file and directory names. I'd be curious to learn what possessed the people responsible for DOS to have ever shipped a system with the insane 8.3 restriction. Even ancient Unix filesystems (early 1970s vintage) supported far more reasonable 14-character filenames.
- pointyhat 15y agoNT API is fine - it's Win32 subsystem that is broken.
- rbanffy 15y ago> I'd be curious to learn what possessed the people responsible for DOS to have ever shipped a system with the insane 8.3 restriction CP/M inspired them. PC-DOS (Q-DOS, really) was more or less a rip-off of DR's CP/M-80. It's possible to give "ease of porting CP/M-80 programs to PC-DOS" as an excuse for that. At that time, short file names were not a big issue, as CP/M filesystems were rather small (5-megabyte hard disks were very expensive at the time) and hierarchical filesystems were outside the realm of microcomputers. PC-DOS didn't introduce directories until version 2. BTW, the Apple II DOS (all versions) had filenames of up to (IIRC) 33 chars, case-sensitive and with one byte to indicate the file type with a flat hierarchy. ProDOS has 16-char filenames with a hierarchical structure.