this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2024
1191 points (98.5% liked)
Memes
45655 readers
1827 users here now
Rules:
- Be civil and nice.
- Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
You go deep enough and very Windows 95 looking menus pop up. Like are they building over the old system? It's all very strange.
yes they are, actually. Backwards compatibility is a huge thing in Windows, it's why you can't name files certain names such as CON, and why you can find things from 3.1 etc. still.
To expand on this: The reason you can't name files CON, etc., is because of a program from the 1960s called Peripheral Interchange Program (PIP), a program used in Digital Equipment Corporation's computers. The overall OS that PIP was part of was called CP/M.
DOS, which came out in the 80s and was made for IBM computers, was modeled after CP/M, and it kept and expanded the capabilities of PIP.
Then Microsoft came along and created a modified version of DOS called MS-DOS which IBM started using.
Eventually, Microsoft created Windows 95, merging two initially separate products: MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows. Microsoft left in the code for handling CON, etc., but they hadn't put in any limitations for filenames, which caused some bugs. So, from the next version of Windows onward, they disallowed the ability for anything to name a folder or file "CON", among other related things.
So the reason you can't name a file or folder "CON" is because of a 60-year-old file-copying program nobody uses anymore.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
which caused some bugs
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.