> I'd be curious to learn what possessed the people responsible for DOS to have ever shipped a system with the insane 8.3 restriction
CP/M inspired them. PC-DOS (Q-DOS, really) was more or less a rip-off of DR's CP/M-80. It's possible to give "ease of porting CP/M-80 programs to PC-DOS" as an excuse for that.
At that time, short file names were not a big issue, as CP/M filesystems were rather small (5-megabyte hard disks were very expensive at the time) and hierarchical filesystems were outside the realm of microcomputers. PC-DOS didn't introduce directories until version 2.
BTW, the Apple II DOS (all versions) had filenames of up to (IIRC) 33 chars, case-sensitive and with one byte to indicate the file type with a flat hierarchy. ProDOS has 16-char filenames with a hierarchical structure.
CP/M inspired them. PC-DOS (Q-DOS, really) was more or less a rip-off of DR's CP/M-80. It's possible to give "ease of porting CP/M-80 programs to PC-DOS" as an excuse for that.
At that time, short file names were not a big issue, as CP/M filesystems were rather small (5-megabyte hard disks were very expensive at the time) and hierarchical filesystems were outside the realm of microcomputers. PC-DOS didn't introduce directories until version 2.
BTW, the Apple II DOS (all versions) had filenames of up to (IIRC) 33 chars, case-sensitive and with one byte to indicate the file type with a flat hierarchy. ProDOS has 16-char filenames with a hierarchical structure.