Steve Wertz > wrote in
:

> MS-DOS (PC-DOS) was nothing like CP/M though. More like Unix, just
> shitier.

It was based on CP/M-86. The Unix-like features were added later. That's
why the backslash was used to separate directories. CP/M used forward
slashes for command options, so it would have made the path parser much
more complicated to allow it to also use slashes for path separators.
(Remember how tight memory was then.) (Also, under the hood, you can use
forward slashes. The backslash was chosen just for the shell, but either
char works in system calls.)