WSL is Microsoft doing its classic "embrace and extend" strategy, yet again.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

Even before that, much of the UI of DOS itself is Unix inspired (DOS even had “files” for certain devices such as PRN and COM)

There are VMS-inspired parts also, but even that is somewhat in the Unix sphere of things.

> Even before that, much of the UI of DOS itself is Unix inspired

The inspiration rather came from CP/M.

...which in turn was strongly influenced by a previous product from DEC.

"Various aspects of CP/M were influenced by the TOPS-10 operating system of the DECsystem-10 mainframe computer, which Kildall had used as a development environment."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/M

Not exactly - several "killer features" of DOS 2.0 were features inspired by Xenix and which were not present in CP/M, including a /DEV/ directory, the mere concept of hierarchical filesystem and optional use of forward slashes in directory paths - backslashes were introduced because of CP/M legacy in commands

No they weren't.

This is an urban myth of computing, and it needs to die.

CP/M commands did not accept command-line switches in any standard way. You are trying to "correct" people who are telling the real story by repeating a myth.

http://www.os2museum.com/wp/why-does-windows-really-use-back...

Ah, I seem to have been waylaid by some of the older mentions there - thanks for the link with mention of M-DOS. I was certain of DEC connections, but thought it came through CP/M and forgot to take into account PDP-10 history of Microsoft.

With the upgrades to WSL in Windows 11 you can run fsv[1] with minimal hassle and finally get the true UNIX experience[2].

1: http://fsv.sourceforge.net/ 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxIPcbmo1_U