I don't think it was about networking, necessarily. Here are a couple references: http://superuser.com/questions/176388/why-does-windows-use-backslashes-for-p

I don't think it was about networking, necessarily. Here are a couple references: http://superuser.com/questions/176388/why-does-windows-use-backslashes-for-paths-and-unix-forward-slashes http://superuser.com/questions/176388/why-does-windows-use-b... MS-DOS 1.0 (which did not support directories at all) was already using / to introduce command-line options. It took this usage of / from CP/M, which took it from VMS. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/larryosterman/archive/2005/06/24/432386.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/larryosterman/archive/2005/06/24/432... goes into more detail.