I have a collection of files from the late ´90s and early ´00s. Many of them are .JPG, .MP3, .WAV, instead of .jpg, .mp3, and .wav. Why was that the norm at the time? I usually just change the extension myself.
I have a collection of files from the late ´90s and early ´00s. Many of them are .JPG, .MP3, .WAV, instead of .jpg, .mp3, and .wav. Why was that the norm at the time? I usually just change the extension myself.
Back in the days of DOS/MS-DOS, all filenames were in uppercase and restricted to 8 letter filename and 3 letter extension.
Because Windows was always just built on top of DOS and the FAT filesystem, until NT/Win2000, the actual file naming convention renamed the same.
Windows just held extra metadata to pretend it could have longer filenames.
Long filenames were introduced in Windows 95. It was done by means of an extension to the filesystem (VFAT). The long filenames were preserved when you copied it to another computer but didn’t show up when you used older DOS versions.
MICROS~1C:\PROGRA~1This looks like what teams does to any lengthy URL which breaks it
I wonder if that’s why computers started using longer words and phrases for programs. The grumpy old man that lives in my in head gets ranting during these moments.
“Back in my day all we had were short names like startup, system, and exit. Now it’s all control panel, system settings, hardware managers. And apps! They’re called them executables!”
Technically it’s a *FAT filesystem thing, and it still carries over into default Windows behaviour today. If I remember correctly, you have to explicitly tell Windows to distinguish between case in filenames, even on NTFS, which otherwise supports it… and then hope that something in the system wasn’t relying on case-insensitivity, which is now broken.
I have a few exFAT-formatted USB thumb drives and I find that Linux (an OS that has been case sensitive, or at least, its filesystems have, since the outset) complains that the filename is already in use when renaming files to lower case versions of themselves on those drives. I generally have to rename to something different (maybe add a letter) and then rename back. The case can be changed at either stage, but the intermediate name has to be different.
Windows has always been garbage and ME was particularly bad, but the NT kernel was the right thing to do
Win2K was nice
Some of us on here go back before PC-DOS 1.0. The 8.3 naming convention started with CP/M . . DOS was largely stolen from Digital Research.
Source: one time proud owner of a TRS-80 Model 4 running CP/M.