Up until 1995, PC users existed in a world where filenames could be only eight characters long. It actually wasn’t as painful as you might imagine.
The PC came out in 1982, and with it DOS. The filename limitation was drilled into everyone’s head:
A filename can be up to eight characters long. It can include letters, numbers, and a smattering of symbols, but no spaces!
An optional dot and three more characters could be added to the filename, but that filename extension was used by the operating system for file association (although with DOS it was more of a suggestion than an outright rule). So it was a bad idea to add or change the extra three characters.
I didn’t have a problem with the eight character limit. I used a TRS-80 for several years. Its operating system (TRSDOS) also had the eight character limit. It’s actually quite amazing what you can squeeze into that space.
For example, the names of most of the major applications from the 1980s fit snugly into eight characters: WORDSTAR and VISICALC being two key examples. dBASE II was DB and WordPerfect was WP, which is even less than the max.
Lots of web sites today easily fit into 8 characters. Consider FACEBOOK, TWITTER, EBAY, GOOGLE, or even WAMBOOLI.
To this day I still number the chapters in my books 01 through 25 or whatever. No need to use all eight characters there.
The only time I really had issues with the eight character limit was with correspondence. For example, LETTER became an over-used filename on my computer’s hard drive. The second epistle was saved as LETTER1 or LETTER2. I could solve the problem by using a folder with the recipient’s name, but either way one had to be brief: LETTER became LTR, INVOICE became INV, and so on.
The major problem, and the justification for longer filenames, is that a filename should be descriptive. Files with super short names? More often than not I had no idea what was in them. And in those days you really couldn’t sneak-peek at a file; you had to attempt to open it. Sometimes that was a Bad Thing.
Windows 95 addressed the filename issue head-on: Gone was the eight character limit. It was a boon because filenames could be as descriptive as you like. The change was welcome, but like anything new it took me some time to get used to.
What’s funny is that even today I occasionally catch myself trying to cram a filename to eight characters. It’s like I either struggle to forget that rule or somehow I’m fearful that all the modern operating systems will vanish and, well, my short filenames will be compatible. Let’s all hope that never happens.
