Why Does Windows Really Use Backslash as Path Separator?

Re:Why Does Windows Really Use Backslash as Path Separator? by StevePerkins on Friday May 24, 2019 @04:32PM (#20005023)

Honestly, it actually DOES make sense to use separate characters for directory-delineation versus option switches.

There was no way of knowing in 1982 that UNIX was going to take over the world. That everything from corporate mainframes, to desktop PC's, and even phones would rally around the conventions of this largely academic OS.

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Re:Why Does Windows Really Use Backslash as Path Separator? by enneff on Friday May 24, 2019 @05:00PM (#20005253)

Unix wasn’t academic. It was pragmatic from the start. A first-hand account: https://youtu.be/EY6q5dv_B-o

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Re:Why Does Windows Really Use Backslash as Path Separator? by kazinator on Friday May 24, 2019 @05:47PM (#20005573)

Also, Bell Labs wasn't a university, and Thompson and Ritchie were not tenured lecturers. They wrote assembly code, not papers.

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Re:Why Does Windows Really Use Backslash as Path Separator? by kragen on Saturday May 25, 2019 @01:41AM (#20007319)

They wrote papers too (Bell Labs was, after all, a research lab), took sabbaticals, and lectured at universities. I think one of the group (Kernighan?) took a sabbatical at Berkeley that was one of the events that gave rise to BSD?

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Re:Why Does Windows Really Use Backslash as Path Separator? by pjmlp on Saturday May 25, 2019 @05:20AM (#20007937)

UNIX was academic, because Bell Labs were forbidden to make profit out of it and thus licensed it via a symbolic price to universities alongside source code tapes.

Had Bell Labs been allowed to sell it, and history would have turned a very different path concerning UNIX clones and its adoption.

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