Like the article says, hindsight is 20/20. If it was 1977 and TRSDOS was the only thing that transformed your expensive brick into something capable of copying a file from one drive to another you might be more of a fan.

In 1977 the drive on my Tandy provided expensive brick was a tape drive but in 1979 I built a LNW System Expansion which added a floppy controller and TRSDOS became what transformed my expensive brick into something capable of copying a file from one of my newly acquired drives to another.

I sometimes become nostalgic regarding my TRS-80 Model I but it never involves TRSDOS. TRSDOS was a steaming pile. There were other operating systems available for the TRS-80 but they added features or fixed bugs. They maintained compatibility with TRSDOS as far as file naming went.

But my comment really wasn't a criticism of the choices made regarding naming then but more about the scope of issues that would be faced in naming conflicts between a hypothetical Windows based upon the TRSDOS conventions and unix systems today. It would make the "\" vs "/" issues seem like a walk in the park.

From the article:

> Note that the odd numbers in square brackets are the TOPS-10 way of specifying directories. Good thing DOS didn’t adopt that one.

DOS did in fact adopt square brackets for specifying (named, not numeric) directories; you see them in square brackets with the '/w' (wide format) option.

" The file system wasn't hierarchical so there was path separator. "

Do you mean the opposite?

A typo. It was non-hierarchical so there was no path separator.

One of the many reasons for the “Trash-80” name.

Whoa, let's not go crazy! Just because the naming conventions, which weren't crazy for the day, would cause issues today doesn't mean you get to call my first child, I mean computer, a "Trash-80". I didn't stand for it then and I won't now.