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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 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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