Why do older files tend to have file extensions in all caps?

Comments

• monketman82@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Back in the days of DOS/MS-DOS, all filenames were in uppercase and restricted to 8 letter filename and 3 letter extension.

  Because Windows was always just built on top of DOS and the FAT filesystem, until NT/Win2000, the actual file naming convention renamed the same.

  Windows just held extra metadata to pretend it could have longer filenames.

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  • blackbeans@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Long filenames were introduced in Windows 95. It was done by means of an extension to the filesystem (VFAT). The long filenames were preserved when you copied it to another computer but didn’t show up when you used older DOS versions.

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    • cypherpunks@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      MICROS~1

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    • ChicoSuave@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      I wonder if that’s why computers started using longer words and phrases for programs. The grumpy old man that lives in my in head gets ranting during these moments.

      “Back in my day all we had were short names like startup, system, and exit. Now it’s all control panel, system settings, hardware managers. And apps! They’re called them executables!”

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  • palordrolap@fedia.io ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Technically it's a *FAT filesystem thing, and it still carries over into default Windows behaviour today. If I remember correctly, you have to explicitly tell Windows to distinguish between case in filenames, even on NTFS, which otherwise supports it... and then hope that something in the system wasn't relying on case-insensitivity, which is now broken.

    I have a few exFAT-formatted USB thumb drives and I find that Linux (an OS that has been case sensitive, or at least, its filesystems have, since the outset) complains that the filename is already in use when renaming files to lower case versions of themselves on those drives. I generally have to rename to something different (maybe add a letter) and then rename back. The case can be changed at either stage, but the intermediate name has to be different.

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  • rockSlayer@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Windows has always been garbage and ME was particularly bad, but the NT kernel was the right thing to do

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    • SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Win2K was nice

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• schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Others have correctly explained that this is because filenames (on DOS) used to have only uppercase letters.

  Interestingly, it’s not completely outdated. Many standalone digital cameras, even ones produced in the 2010s or 2020s, still produce filenames like IMG_1234.JPG or DSC00011.ARW or similar.

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  • AskewLord@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    isn’t that because they are using FAT file systems on their local storage?

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    • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      I think you’re right; the point is that those files will then probably be copied on other file systems that could handle long (and lowercase) file names too, so that may be one way to end up with them without the files coming from the 1990s.

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• lemonSqueezy@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Back in the day when affordable homes were very much bigger compared to now. You could splurge a little on hard drives that could store big size letters. Now that affordable homes (tiny condos) are a teeny tiny bit smaller, it makes sense to shrink the size of the letters so that they fit in a smaller space.

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• AmidFuror@fedia.io ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  It's because eyeglasses hadn't been invented yet, so we needed to make file names bigger.

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  • daggermoon@lemmy.world ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Ah, This explains everything.

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• cypherpunks@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  it was the style at the time

  grandpa simpson pointing at his belt but actually (as the other comment says) uppercase file extensions were a holdover from when the entire filename could only be uppercase

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  • homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Of course in those days 640 Megs of RAM was all we needed.

    “There’ll never be a need for more than that”, you’d say.

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    • ripcord@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      640k

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    • monketman82@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      640kb more like! Don’t get me started on upper and lower ram DOS nonsense…

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    • Yaky@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      You mean 640 KILObytes. Even Playstation 3 had only 256MB RAM.

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    • TheRealKuni@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Not that I want to defend that Epstein-associated adulterer, because fuck him, but he probably never said the quote.

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    • teslekova@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      It was good enough for the Kaiser!

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  • bstix@feddit.dk ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    I liked it better that way.

    The ~ character and roaming folders can go to hell.

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• tunetardis@piefed.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Well sonny, it’s because back then, media files would eat your entire drive in a hurry, so they had to be shouted out as a warning.

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  • daggermoon@lemmy.world ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    And yet 40TB still isn’t enough for my needs.

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    • tunetardis@piefed.ca ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Ah, you’re a gamer then.

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• one_old_coder@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  It can easily be answered by a simple google search.

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  • daggermoon@lemmy.world ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    True, but I’d much rather ask some of Lemmy’s tech veterans than a souless fucking website run by an evil megacorp trying to sell me shit, sell my data, and spam me with AI bullshit. Also, I like fun discussions and the fediverse needs more content.

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  • LunarLoony@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Boring!

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