I might actually upset some folks by saying....who cares, it's just a character?
I've worked with many OS's that didn't even have a directory structure, and those that did were only one level deep. And there wasn't a lot of "slashing" going on....DG RDOS for example. Some other OS's had colons (perhaps VMS - I can't remember now.
We're talking about a time back in the depths of history where OS's had their own specific quirks. To assume that folks bumping into computing way-back-when encountered Unix regularly and "used slashes" is based on a deeply flawed presumption. Back in the early 80's (and into the early 90's) cheap computing was to be had by the use of CP/M and MSDOS, not Unix because it was too bloody expensive for non-academic use. I used to look after a bunch of SCO 86 boxes in my time (pre-Linus), for the customer these licenses were not cheap compared to say MP/M.
My first encounter with Unix and the "forward slash" was in fact in 1986, running on a NCR Tower box (and that's some minor exotica I could go on about...) and to me it was just another thing to remember.
So glorifying Unix over its choice of "/" as a directory separator. Really, who cares?
I enjoy Unix and Linux, but this hagiography over its greatness ("/") seriously makes me wonder about how folks choose an OS these days to get work done.
...did you even read the article? Nowhere does it claim greatness of one over the other, it's simply an interesting piece about a bit of computing history that plenty of people love to learn, because we LOVE trivia.
Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
I've worked with many OS's that didn't even have a directory structure, and those that did were only one level deep. And there wasn't a lot of "slashing" going on....DG RDOS for example. Some other OS's had colons (perhaps VMS - I can't remember now.
We're talking about a time back in the depths of history where OS's had their own specific quirks. To assume that folks bumping into computing way-back-when encountered Unix regularly and "used slashes" is based on a deeply flawed presumption. Back in the early 80's (and into the early 90's) cheap computing was to be had by the use of CP/M and MSDOS, not Unix because it was too bloody expensive for non-academic use. I used to look after a bunch of SCO 86 boxes in my time (pre-Linus), for the customer these licenses were not cheap compared to say MP/M.
My first encounter with Unix and the "forward slash" was in fact in 1986, running on a NCR Tower box (and that's some minor exotica I could go on about...) and to me it was just another thing to remember.
So glorifying Unix over its choice of "/" as a directory separator. Really, who cares?
I enjoy Unix and Linux, but this hagiography over its greatness ("/") seriously makes me wonder about how folks choose an OS these days to get work done.