I don't recall a time when you could use / in Windows file or directory names.

So Windows forbids other characters in names besides the directory separator?

EDIT: Apparently:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1976007/what-characters-...

IIRC, different APIs in Windows handle special characters for filenames differently.

This was probably around the Windows 98 timeframe, but I remember several instances when extracting zips (probably WAREZ) where the file that was written contained characters that Explorer couldn't handle correctly. It wouldn't allow moving those files to the Recycling Bin, but would typically allow renaming the portion before the extension. I had a collection of `zzzz.???` files for a long time.

17-character file name, what madness is that? At best you could do BUDG0912.XSL or BU091282.XSL or something.

We're talking about MacOS now.

It was really common back then to put dates in file names, and names could be 32 characters long. Furthermore, you didn't need an extension because every file had a separate 4-byte (binary, but usually ASCII anyway) type.

Who's talking about MacOS? The GP comment was top-level.