Can we please bury those crappy 'long filenames' now?
The first time I heard about the implementation, I had to check the calendar to see if it was the first of April.
Before then, I thought that the way OS/2 stored extended attributes on FAT was stupid, but this?
Suddenly EVERY D@MN FILE in the root of your drive used AT LEAST two entries in the name table, and that table is limited to 512 names.
It broke every disk editing and file recovery tool on the market, and Windows itself couldn't handle it, so you always got all those strange filenames with ~1 in them in the registry or ini files.
If you're going to break backwards compatibility anyway, why the H! not do it properly?
(After all, all programs are supposed to go through the published APIs to access files, so any normal program that craps out was flawed anyway)
Back in he days of Win3.0/3.1/WfW, there was a flag that could be set in Fileman.ini, which would allow the File manager(and supposedly a few other programs) to see 'long' filenames of up to 16.3 if they were stored on a network disk which supported long filenames.
It's NOT the job of an application to decide what is a valid filename. That job belongs in the filesystem driver, something MS has never really understood.
Frankly, some days I miss the ND computer with its SINTRAN OS and 32.4 namespace.
(No user needs any longer names than that, and if they think otherwise... BZZZT )