Why is the DOS path character « \ » ? - Larry Osterman’s WebLog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs
►http://blogs.msdn.com/b/larryosterman/archive/2005/06/24/432386.aspx
But there was a problem. They couldn’t use the *nix form of path separator of “/”, because the “/” was being used for the switch character.
So what were they to do? They could have used the “.” character like the DEC machines, but the “.” character was being used to differentiate between file and extension. So they chose the next best thing - the “\” character, which was visually similar to the “/” character.
And that’s how the “\” character was chosen.
En fait, l’histoire de l’informatique, ou plutôt de la programmation m’intéresse de plus en plus. On y découvre que rien n’est vraiment rationnel, juste une affire humaine comme les autres, avec ses aléas et ses vicissitudes.