binary data files

[Walter Bright]

In article <12815 at ut-emx.UUCP> nather at ut-emx.UUCP (Ed Nather) writes:
<This whole mess came about because the author(s) of MS-DOS refused to accept
<the Unix convention of a single '\n' newline character instead of '\r''\n'.
<CPM still lives; its genes are hiding inside MS-DOS.

And CPM is based on DEC's RT-11 for PDP-11 computers. At the time, DEC
operating systems were very popular, and they all used the \r and \n
convention. Unix was not nearly so prevalent then. So you cannot fault
CPM for not following the unix conventions. MS-DOS got a head start by
making it easy to port CPM programs over to it. At the time it had
no C compiler or hard disk, so there was no urge to port unix code to it.
All that existed was CPM assembly programs.

All in all, most of the decisions were rational and made sense at the time.
It's rather easy to criticize from 10 years later.

MS-DOS moved into the unix camp and away from DEC with version 2.0. The
big screwup here was using a \ as a separator, rather than /. I suspect
that the reason was that Microsoft used the / as a switch character in
all their application programs.