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From: valley@uchicago (Doug Dougherty)
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.misc
Subject: Re: Where is the long awaited MS DOS 5.0 ?
Message-ID: <valley.670349467@gsbsun>
Date: 30 Mar 91 16:11:07 GMT
References: <gsa8u1w163w@mantis.co.uk> <609@dlscg3.dlsc.dla.mil>
Sender: news@midway.uchicago.edu (News Administrator)
Organization: University of Chicago
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dlsc1509@dlscg3.dlsc.dla.mil (Bill Hoyt) writes:

>  I read somewhere awhile back the reason that MS-DOS uses the backslash as
>  the pathname separator, but I can't remember where I read it.  It stated
>  that when the original PC's were developed they did not look far enough
>  into the future to see that pathnames would be needed, because the
>  original PC only supported cassette and floppy drives, hense the
>  term cassette basic.  When it became apparant that a pathname separator
>  was needed for later versions of the PC that supported hard drives
>  MicroSoft found themselves with a little problem.  Since, they had
>  already used the slash character as a switch character, they had to use
>  another character.  They selected the backslash as that character.

It wasn't so much a matter of not looking forward to the need for paths,
as that, originally, DOS was intended to look as much as possible like CP/M.
CP/M (like RSTS before it) used the slash, so DOS 1.0 used the slash (so
that people could easily make the transition from CP/M)

One can argue that the break could (should?) have been made at any point
along the way (i.e., CP/M -> DOS 1.0 or DOS 1.0 -> DOS 2.0)  But it
wasn't...