When did Windows start accepting forward slash as a path separator?

[Michael Geary]

Stephen Ferg wrote:
> When did Windows start accepting the forward slash as a path separator
> character?
>
> At one time, it was accepted as a truism that Windows (like MS-DOS)
> was different from Unix because Windows used the backslash as the path
> separator character, whereas Unix used the forward slash.
>
> But now, among a small group of cognoscenti, it is a truism that this
> is a myth, and that Windows will allow you to use either the forward
> or the backward slash as a pathname separator.
>
> I hypothesize that originally Windows accepted only the backslash, and
> then at some time it changed to accept the forward slash as well.
> Does anyone know when that change occurred?  Was it with the
> introduction of support for long filenames in NT and Win95?

Hi Steve,

Every version of Windows has accepted "/" as a path separator. So has every
version of MS-DOS beginning with DOS 2.0 (the first version that had
subdirectories).

It's only been in command lines that "/" was not allowed, because it had
already been used as a switch delimiter in MS-DOS 1.0.

-Mike