The tilde file names in windows harken back to ye olde days of MSDOS, where file names were only allowed to be 8 characters long, and the extension was only all

The tilde file names in windows harken back to ye olde days of MSDOS, where file names were only allowed to be 8 characters long, and the extension was only allowed to be a dot followed by three characters (aka: the "eight-dot-three" file naming convention). Like, if someone generated several thousand files, all named: "New Text Document.txt" In the background, some versions of Windows will also record an alternate file name for ye olde backwards compatibility, such as: NEWTEX~1.TXT NEWTE~10.TXT NEWT~100.TXT NEW~1000.TXT NE~10000.TXT N~100000.TXT It's not really about the space characters, so much as it is about length constraints from back when 640KB should've been more memory than anyone will ever need.