I have a collection of files from the late ´90s and early ´00s. Many of them are .JPG, .MP3, .WAV, instead of .jpg, .mp3, and .wav. Why was that the norm at the time? I usually just change the extension myself.
Back in the days of DOS/MS-DOS, all filenames were in uppercase and restricted to 8 letter filename and 3 letter extension.
Because Windows was always just built on top of DOS and the FAT filesystem, until NT/Win2000, the actual file naming convention renamed the same.
Windows just held extra metadata to pretend it could have longer filenames.
Long filenames were introduced in Windows 95. It was done by means of an extension to the filesystem (VFAT). The long filenames were preserved when you copied it to another computer but didn’t show up when you used older DOS versions.
MICROS~1C:\PROGRA~1
I wonder if that’s why computers started using longer words and phrases for programs. The grumpy old man that lives in my in head gets ranting during these moments.
“Back in my day all we had were short names like startup, system, and exit. Now it’s all control panel, system settings, hardware managers. And apps! They’re called them executables!”
Technically it’s a *FAT filesystem thing, and it still carries over into default Windows behaviour today. If I remember correctly, you have to explicitly tell Windows to distinguish between case in filenames, even on NTFS, which otherwise supports it… and then hope that something in the system wasn’t relying on case-insensitivity, which is now broken.
I have a few exFAT-formatted USB thumb drives and I find that Linux (an OS that has been case sensitive, or at least, its filesystems have, since the outset) complains that the filename is already in use when renaming files to lower case versions of themselves on those drives. I generally have to rename to something different (maybe add a letter) and then rename back. The case can be changed at either stage, but the intermediate name has to be different.
Some of us on here go back before PC-DOS 1.0. The 8.3 naming convention started with CP/M . . DOS was largely stolen from Digital Research.
Source: one time proud owner of a TRS-80 Model 4 running CP/M.
Others have correctly explained that this is because filenames (on DOS) used to have only uppercase letters.
Interestingly, it’s not completely outdated. Many standalone digital cameras, even ones produced in the 2010s or 2020s, still produce filenames like IMG_1234.JPG or DSC00011.ARW or similar.
isn’t that because they are using FAT file systems on their local storage?
I haven’t used a newer digital camera, but I recall most of them require a FAT32 format for their memory cards.
I think you’re right; the point is that those files will then probably be copied on other file systems that could handle long (and lowercase) file names too, so that may be one way to end up with them without the files coming from the 1990s.
It’s because eyeglasses hadn’t been invented yet, so we needed to make file names bigger.
Ah, This explains everything.
it was the style at the time
but actually (as the other comment says) uppercase file extensions were a holdover from when the entire filename could only be uppercase
Of course in those days 640
Megsof RAM was all we needed.“There’ll never be a need for more than that”, you’d say.
640k
640B ought to be enough for anybody
If you use ZFS like me, you can never have enough.
640kb more like! Don’t get me started on upper and lower ram DOS nonsense…
But does this game need himem.sys, or emm386.exe?
It was good enough for the Kaiser!
Not that I want to defend that Epstein-associated adulterer, because fuck him, but he probably never said the quote.
Yeah it took on a life of its own, including his effort to crush it or explain it away. But I think he said it. Also that it was heavily context-dependent, and ultimately just a way to shit on the man who single-handedly robbed us all of an open-source utopia of informed citizenry by being a greedy bastard.
Back in the day when affordable homes were very much bigger compared to now. You could splurge a little on hard drives that could store big size letters. Now that affordable homes (tiny condos) are a teeny tiny bit smaller, it makes sense to shrink the size of the letters so that they fit in a smaller space.
Because DOS/early Windows had a filesystem that had very limited filenames. You had eight characters for the actual filename and three for the file extension. They were stored and displayed in all caps, but matching was always case insensitive.
That explains both the upper case and the three character extension limit.
Worth mentioning that this wasn’t a problem on other systems. Unix had long, case-sensitive names before DOS existed.
It can easily be answered by a simple google search.
Boring!
True, but I’d much rather ask some of Lemmy’s tech veterans than a souless fucking website run by an evil megacorp trying to sell me shit, sell my data, and spam me with AI bullshit. Also, I like fun discussions and the fediverse needs more content.
