ASCII.jp: Why did the Windows path separator become an inverted slash? ｜Windows Info
- There was a command in MS-DOS 1.1 that took parameters with a slash.
- At that time, hierarchical file systems did not yet exist, so path separators were not necessary.
- Introducing the Hierarchical File System in MS-DOS 2.0
- Unix already existed at that time, with slashes for path separators and hyphens for parameters
- Backslash was adopted as a path separator rather than aligned with Unix, with the goal of keeping batch files written for MS-DOS 1.1 running.
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