Many of these details are from Microsoft employee Larry Osterman’s blog post on the subject, which contains more detailed inside information from Microsoft employees who made these decisions.
Forward slash vs backslash windows#
Windows may not be built on top of DOS anymore, but you can still see the legacy of DOS throughout Windows in the way backslashes and other features like drive letters are used for the file system. They ultimately chose the \ character instead, as it was the most similar-looking character visually. Microsoft had already used the / character for something, so they couldn’t just re-use it.
MS-DOS 2.0 introduced support for directories, but IBM wanted to keep compatibility with the original DOS utilities and other programs that expected the / character to be used for switches. RELATED: Does Windows Still Rely on MS-DOS? (On Unix, the – character is used instead of the / character to indicate switches.)Īt the time, people didn’t really care that they were using a character that was used for a different purpose on another operating system. The different types of slashes here indicate whether you’re specifying an option or a directory path. You can still see this today in the command prompt - running the command dir /w tells the dir command to run with the wide list format option, while running the command dir c:\ tells the dir command to list the contents of drive C:\. Most of the utilities included with DOS were written by IBM, and they used the / character as a “switch” character. It’s hard to imagine today, but the original version of Microsoft DOS - that’s MS-DOS 1.0 - didn’t support directories at all when it was released in 1981. We don’t really know why they chose this one, but that’s the one they picked. Unix introduced the forward slash character - that’s the / character - as its directory separator around 1970.
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