 The backslash file name separator on Windows still rankles after almost 40 years. It just looks wrong, unbalanced, tippy. But even worse is that in common parlance now, \ is often called slash and / backslash. Microsoft will never be forgiven for promulgating this affront. 17 comments
@robpike if it was the Brits who conceptualized it instead it would be stroke and backstroke .. oh the jokes !  At Locus we made T-shirts for our LOCUS operating system (single-system image clustered OS based on 4.1 BSD): On the front it said "Better Living Through Transparency"; on the back were the same words in mirror image. @robpike perhaps the original sin was using / as the command switch indicator in MS DOS 1.0 and that pushed them to use \ for the directory separator in MS DOS 2.0 in order to keep / as the unambiguous switch indicator and maintain backward compatibility when they “copied” UNIX hierarchical directories (sort-of). @robpike I read once that the choice of backslash was to obscure the similarity of DOS to CP/M. Is there any truth to that?  @robpike Personally I tend to blame the situation on the invention of backslash in the first place. I wasn't there for it, but I gather it was a hack so that /\ (slash followed by backslash) would look like ∧ (logical conjunction symbol). Perhaps there is more known about the history but based on my limited reading, there wasn't any such character until that time (certainly not with any widespread usage).  @robpike I must be out of the loop: I have never heard anyone swap the meaning of slash and backslash, but now I have heard of the possibility, I think retirement is my only option.  @robpike I haven’t personally heard anyone refer to / as backslash. \ is backslash, / is slash or forward slash. @robpike I blame IBM: "Most of these are  @robpike Every time I hear a DJ say "backslash" when reading a URL, a little more of my faith in humanity erodes away. @robpike I remember back 29 years ago when I had my first struggles with LaTeX. I struggled for a long time to typeset a backslash. Only to discover, once I succeeded, that I actually just needed a regular slash 🙃  |
Gregory's Server
On the other hand, our Bell Labs softball team was called the Backslashes, and our team jersey had a backslash on the front and a slash on the back. Nerd sports FTW.