[cynwoody]

There is a good reason why ctrl-alt-del is a three-key, two-handed chord. I recall the time a babe in the arms of his mother suddenly reached out and pushed the red power button on an IBM mainframe.

Now, if Mr Bill wants an example of something truly obnoxious, I nominate the choice of backslash (\) as the DOS/Windows file separator. Everywhere else, it's the escape character. But MS just had to be different.

[editor-surveyor]

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>> “But MS just had to be different.” <<

Or had to do something to avoid accusation that DOS was just a rip-off of UNIX.
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[editor-surveyor]

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I have to admit its been 40 years, but hitting “power off” did nothing on the machines I’ve used, unles one first hit “int req,” “Imm stop” by my recollection.

[dayglored]

> Now, if Mr Bill wants an example of something truly obnoxious, I nominate the choice of backslash (\) as the DOS/Windows file separator. Everywhere else, it's the escape character. But MS just had to be different.

Nah, here's the real story. MSDOS had to be compatible with CP/M, which used the forward slash (/) as a command option flag. At the time, Microsoft was a UNIX house -- they were the providers of XENIX, one of the most widely used UNIX variants at the time.

Microsoft's programmers said, "To hell with CP/M compatibility, go with the UNIX/XENIX convention of forward slash for directory separator, hyphen for command options, and backslash for the escape character."

But Marketing won the battle, and MSDOS used CP/M's forward slash for command options, forcing the use of backslash for directory separator, and no escape character. Terrible, terrible.

But interestingly, in the early days of MSDOS, there were a couple of little-known ways to get around it, put there by the XENIX programmers. You could set environment variables ESCHAR and SWITCHAR to values and MSDOS would use them instead of the defaults.

So folks like me would have an AUTOEXEC.BAT that included:

set ESCHAR=\
set SWITCHAR=-

And we could type command lines that looked normal to UNIX folks.

Moreover, if you were programming in C or similar languages, all the system calls of MSDOS and later of Windows (it's still true today) will accept forward slash as a directory separator.

I agree the use of backslash for directory separator is a travesty. But it's not going away anytime soon....