The System360 Model 20 Wasn't As Bad As All That 3862

While this example does prove that long file names are supported, it illustrates another major "broken as designed" feature: the acceptance of "CON" as the console, without requiring a trailing colon to identify a separate device name space. The system is smart enough to distinguish between a file called A and drive A: - why not other devices as well? Ironically, the colon is optional; CON: works just as well, and I use it just to maintain good habits. Even more ironically, people who loudly disparage the use of reserved words in COBOL will just as loudly defend the use of reserved file names such as CON. These people deserve to have someone go into their directory with a file zapper to rename a file to CON, so they can be laughed at as they try to figure out how to delete that file.

The above example also indirectly demonstrates another breakage of design. The ^Z is appended to the end of the file, rather than just serving as an EOF signal to the COPY command. There is no reason to have a special end-of-file character; the file size is stored to the byte in the directory. The ^Z is a throwback to CP-M (this discussion is about backward compatibility, right?) and it has caused nothing but problems ever since.

F3 was pretty pitiful, but some systems support up-arrow to recall recent (with the emphasis on "recent") commands. Command history under Windows has always been pretty pathetic compared to what's available under Unix; perhaps a replacement shell is in order.

Like maybe wildcard handling that isn't severely broken? Go ahead, show me how to find all files whose names begin with "ab" and end with "c". (Hint: ab*c won't work; once a Windows shell sees an asterisk, that's all she wrote.)

There's a reason that the few improvements that have appeared are undocumented. Microsoft seems to have some hidden agenda to force people's hands off the keyboard and onto the mouse. Few things that make a command-line interface easier to use have been introduced since MS-DOS. Hanlon's Razor states: "Never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity." To which a little voice in the back of mind replies: "But Microsoft isn't stupid!"

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