I stumbled upon this blog entry on The Old New Thing which discusses the 8.3 filename convention on MS-DOS and Windows up to and including XP, which limits a filename to 8 characters with a 3 character extension.

Now I haven’t run Windows since 1998, although I’m forced to used it at work. While the filename limitation was effectively eliminated by Windows 95 and the introduction of VFAT for most casual users, as oldnewthing points out, it still has ramifications to programmers.

I find this sad.

My very first computer, a Commodore 64 purchased in the ‘80’s, could use up to 16 characters in the filename. The original incarnation of the filesystem for UNIX (now commonly referred to as s5fs) which existed in the ‘70’s could have 14 characters in the filename. The original Macintoshes with the Macintosh File System could have 255 characters (although this was in practice limited to 31 characters because of the limitations of the Finder)

And here we are in 2007, with programmers still having to deal with 8.3. Hah!