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C:\ONGRTLNS.W95
How a file system written for 160 KB floppies survived twenty years, and how Windows 95 taught it to spell
On August 24, 1995, the day Windows 95 went on sale, Apple bought a full page in the Wall Street Journal. The page was almost empty. Near the middle, in a serif face, sat eleven characters and a backslash, and at the bottom, small, the Apple logo. Nothing else. The joke needed no caption because every PC user of the era had spent a decade squeezing words into the same shape: eight letters, a dot, three more, uppercase, no spaces, and no room for the vowels.
The ad was funny because it was true, and stale for the same reason. Windows 95 was the release that finally let a PC user name a file “Letter to the bank about the mortgage.doc”. The way it did so, without breaking a single one of the ten years of DOS programs that expected the old shape, is one of the neater pieces of compatibility engineering Microsoft ever shipped, and it is a story that starts on a floppy disk with 320 sectors.
