Once upon a time a computer file name could only be 8 character long.
And people had to try to make programs and games work like that. Tons and tons of files, 8 character limit.
And people had to try to make programs and games work like that. Tons and tons of files, 8 character limit.
Comments
I happened to get that handle a couple of years into dialing up to BBS'; I loved that it was exactly 8 letters.
It was likely why l33t was a thing... people HAD to get creative with their labels.
🎶Internet killed the BBS star...
... and Y2K killed my poor little BBS. The software used 2-digit years. 😥
Yes, autocorrect, fidonet is SO a word. (shakes fist at sky)
Oh the joys of trying to squish each node of a BBS into a 128k memory space.
But seriously, I remember being really creative (acronyms sticky notes all over) and really UNcreative (file0001.dat, file0002.dat, ...)
Also, some 8.3 filenames were reserved on DOS (and still are on Windows), such as "CON", "AUX" and "NUL".
I miss the text based games.
I was thinking that you used a factorial to calculate every possibility for a password if you have 8 digits and x possibilities for those digits=all possibilities is 8!.
No idea what I am concept I am confusing 🙄🤷♀️
i was wrong. it wasn't like this whole thing was social experiment; it turned into one after I was wrong. Giggles
(my main computer had 32 characters + unlimited file comment already in 1987)
The first computer system I used allowed only 6-dot-3 names.
prg_002
txt_001
mod_001
mod_002
I hear you ;)
65,000,000,000,000,000
file names (all having the same extension).
DOSbox is nicer though because you can pass stuff in as command line arguments to dosbox and it'll run that command right away which is how launchers for the games work.
It would be:
Thrillho.use
Now get offa' my lawn!
Boomer Hoomer :)
*rewinding to manic miner*
c:\\dflnmdr.doc
is now
c:\\the file name of your dreams.doc
Maybe I can find that poster at Babbage’s.
They may be right.
⬆️ cognitive load, ⬇️ typing
on my 5150 to run faster, I switched that bad boy into 40col mode and got insta-colors!
Is it any wonder we pioneered using U and R and LOL and roflmao?
And now it's easier we stubbornly use punctuation and grammar? BECAUSE WE CAN!!!
/EOM
Unless you were on Mac or Unix or something. Despite being the dominant OS, MS-DOS was primitive as all fuck.
https://youtu.be/vLlWrt-zmTo?si=qKs7G1jrFgUmZcgc
(I've come around to the idea since)
Other filesystems are... Sane? So. Yeah.
mac was 31 if i remember correctly, and didn't need extensions since file type info was stored separately
That means the total amount of combinations would be 409.663.695.276.000 (if my math works out lol)
That doesn’t make for a very comprehensive file system.
CD\ is for absolute paths.
CD[space] is for relative paths.
So CD\ with nothing after takes you to the root of that drive. (Forward slash for filesystem root is a Linux thing).
All of these still work in CMD and PowerShell.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dosdaddy/
It is still too short, when People use descriptive directory names and project numbers are long.
But looks like there are some caveats.
//customers/customer West France oil company/projects 2024/Texas oil refinery 11077789-166a/email/sent/2024-070-011/drawings/oil tank/3d-model/1107779 MAIN ASSEMBLY REVISION C.dwg
D:\tunes\albums\Benny Goodman\The Famous 1938 Carnegic Hall Jazz Concert plus 1950s material (CD4 - Soundtrack of The Benny Goodman Story)
Yvgtmail.wav
That 6 limit bled into UNIX systems. even though they always had longer filenames, and is how we got a bunch of things like 'passwd'.
no such limitations on Unix.
thank god for better operating systems.
I'll take unix/linux every time, thanks.
1992 was the goddamn stone age.
I also had a little pit in my house that we would spark paper and tinder to ignite wood and huddle near it for warmth.
WELCOME THRILHOU
These comments remind me of DOS word perfect that had that template that sat above the function keys so you knew how to do anything.
It deleted “pcpdf.exe”, which was a purchased product.
We had backup .
A limitation of a FAT DIRENT.
The first 8 bytes is the file name, and the last 3 bytes are the extension, padded with spaces.
(Which is why, fun fact, you can't have spaces in 8.3 names)
Also fun fact, a deleted file is just a file who's first
Practically speaking, no one actually supported this. (Maybe *nix vfat drivers, but I doubt it)
This is how undelete utilities worked, and why you had to provide the first letter of the recovered file. :)
You know you're a nerd when you have shit like this memorized.
I remember WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS with great fondness. No WYSIWYG for us! Ah, those were the days...
Come to think of it, I think Win11 still has this limitation.
For all your programs *and* the OS and it's drivers...
It is still too short in commercial use.
Win10+ You can edit your group policy or registry to enable unlimited path lengths.
Just be aware that they can't copy to filesystem formats that don't support it, like FATs.
Not
I that it's good
They didn't have *filenames*. The files were accessed by **number**.
Sounds like shitpost but it's actually true.
Their lead hardware engineer liked to write uncommented *machine code* as source code. NOT assembly - the actual machine code. As in a series of octal numbers.
It's basically how ended up with easily identifiable file types.
Snow White and the 7 dwarfs.
Actually discovered this when reading the sourcecode for FreeType and saw it was including everything using macros
Apparently they had macros expand to their 8 character file names so that you wouldnt need to memorize the 8 random characters for each file
Programmer 101, rule #1, NEVER use space. Ever.
I also resent they’ve just never changed obvious things like scroll bar size adjustment. It’s not a lot to ask.
MAC = Medium Access Control #pedant 😊
I use both. I’m loyal to neither. It’s definately got its indefensible issues.
It’s ok to criticize.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forth_(programming_language)