I doubt it was a day. I'd be surprised if it was more than a minute or two.
TOPS-10 subdirectory separators were commas, but the path was enclosed in [] so it was always clear which part was a path and which part was something else.
UNIX and DOS/Windows made a big mistake by removing the enclosing characters, and TOPS-10 was a 6.3 file system that never used them to their full extent.
The (back) slashes and switches weren't the biggest problem. Spaces in file paths were - and sometimes still are - hard to deal with.
A standard pair of enclosing characters would have eliminated a lot of unnecessary and unreliable escape character logic, and would also have allowed almost all other characters to be used without problems.
TOPS-10 subdirectory separators were commas, but the path was enclosed in [] so it was always clear which part was a path and which part was something else.
UNIX and DOS/Windows made a big mistake by removing the enclosing characters, and TOPS-10 was a 6.3 file system that never used them to their full extent.
The (back) slashes and switches weren't the biggest problem. Spaces in file paths were - and sometimes still are - hard to deal with.
A standard pair of enclosing characters would have eliminated a lot of unnecessary and unreliable escape character logic, and would also have allowed almost all other characters to be used without problems.