And I am not sure if their argument holds water. CP/M is clearly influenced by DEC usage [1], and various DEC OS and tools had slashes for tool options as a sta

And I am not sure if their argument holds water. CP/M is clearly influenced by DEC usage [1], and various DEC OS and tools had slashes for tool options as a standard. Those then got carried over to CP/M (e.g. PIP), so that was the standard way to define options everyone CP/M used would have known. It's really really hard to imagine the usage for slashes as arguments was not a carry over. And for anyone old enough to actually remember the transition from CP/M to MS-DOS (like me), it felt very natural. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/M https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/M