Member-only story
HISTORY
It Hurts My Teeth When You Say Backslash
How are your floppy disks holding up?
See that “C:\” in the screenshot? That “\” is a backslash. The “/”’s in “http://somewhere.com/whatever.html” are slashes, not backslashes.
That’s all you need to know. You may stop reading now and go about your business.
But I’m going to stay here and rant on for a while because I still sometimes hear people say “h t t p colon backslash backslash” and it hurts me. It makes me grit my teeth and I’m going to tell you why.
Some of this is taken from my 2008 “Linux and Unix Troubleshooting” book which has been on Amazon for many a year but they are going to kill it soon because, duh, who cares in 2021?
Slashes: some history
Way back in the beginning, just after the dinosaurs all died, Microsoft DOS didn’t have sub-directories. You could put files on a disk (usually on a floppy, because hard drives were very expensive back then), but you couldn’t make directories to organize your files.
Unix, which had been around a decade or so longer than anything Microftish, did have subdirectories, and then, as now, a path through multiple directories would be indicated by a “/”. That’s a “forward slash”, or just “slash”. It’s…
