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

[Stephen Horne]

On Fri, 26 Sep 2003 02:03:10 GMT, "Andrew Dalke"
<adalke at mindspring.com> wrote:

>Stephen Ferg:

>> 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.
>
>It was?  My copy of Norton's Guide to the IBM PC makes
>the explicit statement that directories were directly influenced by
>unix.  I actually regard this as a point of similarity.  The character
>used is a minor issue.

Directly influenced, yes - but as DOS 1 didn't have subdirectories but
did have options marked with '/', the unix subdirectories couldn't be
duplicated exactly in DOS 2. The character used *is* a minor issue,
but it is still a difference - what Stephen Ferg wrote is, I believe,
valid.

Even if DOS was internally happy to accept '/' as a path separator,
still the 'accepted as a truism' bit rings true to me - what is
accepted as an obvious truth is not always actually true, and to most
people users DOS was the command line and Windows was just a shell on
top of DOS - the 'truism' was what people could see, not what was
hidden away in the INT 21h calls that only programmers cared about.


-- 
Steve Horne

steve at ninereeds dot fsnet dot co dot uk