[Samba] Re: Full wNT/w2K ACL conformance

[Hall, Ken (IDS ECCS)]

"Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity."

Or in this case, an attempt at compatibility for users who had come from the DEC minicomputer world.

DOS 1.0 took a lot of it's command line conventions from CP/M, which got them from the old DEC stuff.  RT-11, OS-8, etc.  UNIX wasn't really on anyone's radar screen at that point, at least not for
PC's.

There's no logic here, just however someone felt like doing it.  No "usability studies", and design-by-committee in those days.

Can you imagine a review committee letting someone get away with "ls", "cat", and "grep" these days? DIR and TYPE at least made some sense, even if "PIP" didn't. :)

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dragan Krnic [mailto:dkrnic at lycos.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, June 18, 2003 12:26 PM
> To: Michael MacIsaac
> Cc: samba at lists.samba.org
> Subject: [Samba] Re: Full wNT/w2K ACL conformance
> 
> 
> >UH-OH! Maybe it's IBM's fault:
> >
> >Those OS's used forward slash as the "option" 
> >indicator on command line utilities.  In their 
> >earliest form, neither had hierarchical directories,
> >so there was no conflict.  When UNIX-style paths
> >appeared in DOS 2.0, to avoid breaking compatibility 
> >with existing BAT files (and confusing users), IBM 
> >(or whoever) used the backslash for the path 
> >separator.
> 
> Here we go again: why slash and not dash? Seattle
> Computers had global ulterior designs for sure {:-)
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> 
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