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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Why is the DOS path character "\"?

Many of the DOS utilities (except for command.com) were written by IBM, and they used the "/" character as the "switch" character for their utilities (the "switch" character is the character that's used to distinguish command line switches - on *nix, it's the "-" character, on most DEC operating systems (including VMS, the DECSystem-20 and DECSystem-10), it's the "/" character" (note: I'm grey on whether the "/" character came from IBM or from Microsoft - several of the original MS-DOS developers were old-hand DEC-20 developers, so it's possible that they carried it forward from their DEC background).

[...] Then along came DOS 2.0. DOS 2.0 was tied to the PC/XT, whose major feature was a 10M hard disk. IBM asked the Microsoft to add support for hard disks, and the MS-DOS developers took this as an opportunity to add support for modern file APIs - they added a whole series of handle based APIs to the system (DOS 1.0 relied on an application controlled structure called an FCB). They also had to add support for hierarchical paths.

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