They did alter the Windows filename restrictions. You can happily create a file that is 1000 characters long, and your Windows 95 software will likely refuse t

They did alter the Windows filename restrictions. You can happily create a file that is 1000 characters long, and your Windows 95 software will likely refuse to open it. (Hell, Windows Explorer refuses to deal with it.) Now we've got a situation where we keep crowing about how changing MAX_PATH would break compatibility. Except, of course, that we already did that by adding the stupid '\\?\' APIs (which are themselves a mess). So now we don't actually have backward compatibility for those programs (we just make it so hard to use long paths that we virtually have backward compatibility.) And we have file paths that resemble 1995. We don't have the lowest common denominator, we just have the worst of both worlds.