Microsoft has restrictions
Yet another reason that Micro$loth is a jerk.
MS had a policy of retaining backward compatibility (which they have since
largely discarded of late). It meant users of older systems and other
platforms could communicate. To 'modernize' their OS they had ways in some
of their OSs of apparently breaking the 8.3 convention allowing long file
names that didn't cause issues with older and non-windows OSs, which was a
nice touch.
I always admired that sort of developer loyalty, they could have made gross
changes and tried to force upgrades on people for their own convenience with
each iteration of their OS, but instead they gave themselves the extra work
of ensuring things worked for as many users as possible - this changed with
Vista when the 'let's get rid of all that old stuff holding us back' camp in
MS got their way (after Bill left) and so now we have what we have - modern
Windows that doesn't play well with it's aged cousins.
well may one laugh at windows for it's naming limitations, but how grand
does Apple look when in 1998 Amiga allowed users to have a 32,000 character
file name?
All OS's have file name limitations :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filename
the section labelled "Comparison of filename limitations" is FAR from
exhaustive
