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A comment on The structure of the special type of DOS files called directories (1998). Parent comment

Re:The structure of the special type of DOS files called dir... by jandrese on Monday February 25, 2019 @01:11PM (#19247847)
I'm saying that even taking reverse compatibility into mind (which they didn't even have, FAT32 couldn't be read by a FAT16 driver) the way the filenames are encoded is a mess with the name being split up by attribute and checksum bytes.

One has the impression that it looks like it does because they didn't want to touch most of the FAT16 driver code and instead tried to make touchups around the edges.

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Re:The structure of the special type of DOS files called dir... by anyfoo on Monday February 25, 2019 @01:19PM (#19247932)
Not sure what you mean. They did it precisely for compatibility. It worked for FAT16 (and probably FAT12, for that matter) as well, and in fact long file names came before FAT32. Anything that would trip up older DOS versions or any other FAT consumers was a no-go.
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Re:The structure of the special type of DOS files called dir... by xenadu02 on Monday February 25, 2019 @01:34PM (#19248082)
IIRC Long filename support was introduced with Windows 95, which shipped with FAT16. It wasn’t until OSR2 that they introduced FAT32.

In theory FAT32 could have introduced a new on-disk data structure but I guess they wanted the minimum required changes to support larger disks.

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Re:The structure of the special type of DOS files called dir... by 0x0 on Monday February 25, 2019 @02:15PM (#19248466)
You could boot into pure DOS in win9x even on fat32, and pure DOS does not support long file names. Perhaps they kept that hack to be compatible with the fat32 "light" implementation of the DOS that shipped with win9x.
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