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

[Robin Becker]

In article <b16e4ef7.0309251550.724a57f at posting.google.com>, Stephen
Ferg <steve at ferg.org> writes
>I have a question that is not directly Python-related.  But I thought
>I'd ask the most erudite group that I know... :-)
>
>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?

I seem to remember getting an early C compiler from M$ around 1983/5 and
being pleasantly surprised that '/' was acceptable. So far as I know
this has been true from the earliest days. I suspect it was because of
all the unix C code that people wanted to work without effort.
-- 
Robin Becker