Quote:
Originally Posted by DaleDe
You can thank microsoft for the fact that you even need to worry about a backslash. Slashes have always been used on Unix systems to separate folders and hyphens have always been used to indicate options since the early 70s. (they are still used on everything but windows including URL's. But Microsoft decided to use slashes (/) for options in their DOS so when they introduced folders sometime later they had to come up with a different symbol hence the silly backslash (\). Since they controlled the keyboard they stuck it on.
Dale
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Well, to give the spawn of Satan its due, microsoft copied / for options and device: notation from DEC, but not the [] and . delimiters for directory paths. In no way did they have any keyboard control when they bought a CPM clone to sell to IBM as DOS.
The \ had been used by UNIX shells and C as an escape character before Gates and Allen pirated time on the computers of others to write a BASIC interpreter, much less buy the rights to a CPM clone.