When they added directories to DOS, they decided that the colons used as a separator on the DEC system they were basing it on were silly, and the forward slashes used by Unix were nicer. Forward slashes were already the character used to identify something as a command line option rather than a filename on DOS, though, because the world hadn’t settled on Unix’s dash convention yet, and lots of existing software just checked whether an argument contained forward slashes to decide whether or not it was a filename. That software would break if paths could contain forward slashes. However, there was a tempting character on the keyboard originally used to type ∨ and ∧ before unicode that was also a slash, so they used that.
Because Teleprinters! Carriage return goes back to the start of the line, line feed goes to the next line.
If you wanted “bold” on a teleprinter you just did a CR without the LF and printed the same text over the top again.
But why a backslash as separator? Why ô why!
When they added directories to DOS, they decided that the colons used as a separator on the DEC system they were basing it on were silly, and the forward slashes used by Unix were nicer. Forward slashes were already the character used to identify something as a command line option rather than a filename on DOS, though, because the world hadn’t settled on Unix’s dash convention yet, and lots of existing software just checked whether an argument contained forward slashes to decide whether or not it was a filename. That software would break if paths could contain forward slashes. However, there was a tempting character on the keyboard originally used to type ∨ and ∧ before unicode that was also a slash, so they used that.
No no, the real question is why CR LF instead of LF or CR? Why two characters for a line break motherfuckers?
Because Teleprinters! Carriage return goes back to the start of the line, line feed goes to the next line. If you wanted “bold” on a teleprinter you just did a CR without the LF and printed the same text over the top again.
It makes assignments seem longer.
Because forward slashes are used in English
I wonder if it’s legal to have a forward slash in a filename on Windows?
Nope, I use ⧸ as a replacement.