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  From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>
  To  : Daryl Tester <dt@picknowl.com.au>
        Dan Shearer <dan@tellurian.com.au>
  Date: Sun, 31 Dec 2000 10:54:51 +1030

Microsoft delimiters (was: Operating systems.)

On Saturday, 30 December 2000 at 18:17:46 +1030, 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).
>
> 2) Potential for lawsuit from the Unix camp (I think AT&T had just
> started marketing Unix, as Bell Labs. couldn't).

Hmm.  There are too many other things in Microsoft which look
UNIX-like, and which would give more grounds for lawsuits than the
choice of a / character.  I'm sure you could find prior uses of / for
directory delimiters.

I think the real issue was that they had already started using / for
option flags (so you could do things like DIR/W, whatever that means).
They needed a different character for the directory delimiter, and
nobody realized what a problem it would be.

> I'm a bit rusty on the timelines[1], but bear in mind that in those
> days, Microsoft had arranged for some little-known outfit called the
> Santa Cruz Operation to port Xenix to Intel machines, so Microsoft
> were influenced in some fashion by Unix at the time.

They started porting XENIX in 1980.  I think the first DOS with
subdirectories was 2.0, which must have come out about 2 or 3 years
later.

On Saturday, 30 December 2000 at 18:39:25 +1030, Dan Shearer wrote:
> On Sat, 30 Dec 2000, Daryl Tester wrote:
>> Adam Hawes writes (and writes, and writes ...):
> 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.

I think you'll find it has atrophied.  There were some good reasons
why it wouldn't work, probably assumptions in userland code.

>> which is what people who had to work with
>> both Xenix and DOS sometimes did.
>
> I gave up on Xenix after tickling too many (well, two) code
> generation bugs in their C compiler (and MS Basic offered you all
> the advantages of MS Basic with none of the advantages of running it
> under Unix(/Xenix) - I could never figure out how to disable ^C
> processing without editing the binary, which made it useless for the
> BBS I was trying to write for someone).

Not that long ago (about 7 years) I wrote some significant software
for XENIX.  Yes, the entire software development environment was
terrible, but I was able to get the GNU tools working, and after that
it wasn't too bad.  About the only real nuisance was the lack of NFS.

Greg
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