LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Dan Shearer <dan@tellurian.com.au>
  To  : Daryl Tester <dt@picknowl.com.au>
  Date: Sat, 30 Dec 2000 18:39:25 +1030 (CST)

Re: Operating systems.

On Sat, 30 Dec 2000, Daryl Tester wrote:

> Adam Hawes writes (and writes, and writes ...):
> 
> > BTW, do you know why M$ chose drive letters and the '\' over the
> > traditional Unix / method??
> 
> 1) OS limitation; you can't "graft" a file system tree with a limited
> file system/OS (and later implementations of grafting were a kludge).
> Hence the drive letters (original DOS didn't have directory hierarchies
> either - it was just a straight CP/M ripoff).

As to "\" vs "/", it was just a perverse choice I think. There's a DOS int
0x21 call to switch it to "/", which is what people who had to work with
both Xenix and DOS sometimes did.

--
Dan Shearer
Open Source Manager
dan@tellurian.com.au

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