Windows 95 and
Long File Names . . . a Myth?
In creating Windows 95, the successor to MS-DOS and Windows 3.1x, Microsoft has performed what many, including this author, consider a near technological miracle. The death of MS-DOS has been predicted since the debut of the IBM PC-AT more than ten years ago. In Windows 95, however, Microsoft has again demonstrated that MS-DOS is alive and well. Windows 95, despite its name, is really version 7.0 of MS-DOS and version 4.0 of Windows (those version numbers are actually coded in the software). These very closely integrated versions of MS-DOS and Windows provide significant evolutionary technological advances in Intel x86-based operating systems and, with one significant and sometimes painful exception, excellent backward compatibility. The major improvements typically cited for Windows 95 are:
Windows 95 is only partly a 32-bit operating system. This is not a failure on the part of Microsoft, but rather an important part of the technical near-miracle. The "compromise" was necessary to ensure backward compatibility with "legacy" applications (particularly DOS-based programs) and 16-bit drivers. If you ever need to run a DOS-based program in Windows NT (a true 32-bit operating system in which many DOS-based programs run slower than a '4.77 MHz 8088), you will appreciate Windows 95’s underlying DOS code.. The dynamic allocation of memory and increase in system resources are significant and long overdue improvements in Windows. For example, in Windows for Work Groups, on a 90 MHz Pentium with 64 MB RAM, running nothing but Program Manager, I have (had) approximately 80% of system resources available after starting Windows. If I ran Excel 5.0 with a couple of spreadsheets and Word 6.0 with a couple of documents, that would drop to only 30% or 40%. Not only that, but closing an application did not restore all of the resources that were used. As such, it was typical that anyone using several Windows applications had to exit and restart Windows at least a couple times daily (there are even shareware programs that were created specifically to accelerate the Restart Windows procedure). Many problems in Windows could be solved by periodically exiting and restarting Windows. In Windows 95, on the same machine, I start with 97% and 99%, respectively, of User and GDI resources, while already running about a half dozen utilities, like Norton System Doctor, at startup; I would never have put anything in my Windows 3.x Startup group. On top of that, I can run a half dozen applications, including the same 16-bit versions of Excel and Word, along with, for example, PageMaker 5.0, ProComm Plus for Windows 2.11 (both 16-bit applications), and two 32-bit number-cruncher-type applications, MathCAD 6.0 Professional and APL*Plus III for Windows, and still have about 65% of system resources available. Whether or not the user interface is an improvement is highly subjective and depends mostly upon personal preferences. As I've gotten used to it and figured out how to customize it (with the Windows 95 Power Toys, developed by the Windows 95 Development team, but not supported by Microsoft), I generally like it. Nonetheless, I believe it is poorly implemented, mostly because of its dependence on long file names for menu items. And, as you might notice in the remainder of this essay, I am not a fan of long file names on FAT partitions. With the "...previous version[s] of MS-DOS" one was limited to an eleven character filename, an 8-character name and a 3-letter extension. Generally, the extension was used to identify the type of file and the 8-letter name was used to identify the particular file. This led to complaints that people did not know what the files were. The lack of support for long file names was often cited as a weakness in DOS and Windows. The 8.3 filenames were considered limiting and required users to create cryptic names that usually would be forgotten when and if they went looking for their old data and reports. Macintosh-envy is the source of much of this noise. However, the Macintosh is more a religion than a computer. I used Macintosh computers in a Macintosh-oriented "Big 6" accounting firm. I found nothing particularly intuitive about the Macintosh (no more so than DOS or Windows); and given the inability of many intelligent, highly educated accountants (most of which are CPA's) to do much with their Macs, they, too, found very little intuitive about the Mac. Conversely, I believe that almost nothing on a PC is more intuitive than the MS-DOS prompt. Maybe this makes me a propeller head, but if I want to copy or move a file, the commands in MS-DOS are "Copy" and "Move." I have no trouble remembering them. Every time I use a Macintosh or a Windows-based file management program, I have to test it first to figure out whether I want "Drag & Drop" or "Ctrl + Drag & Drop" (and they don't always do the same thing) and am not 100% sure at this moment which one it is. I question whether the limitations of the 8.3 file naming system was or is really a problem. I have worked on a couple thousand projects for over two hundred fifty clients over the last thirteen years, and, with only a handful of (intentional) exceptions, every proposal, every analysis, every report, and every set of data provided to me is on my hard drive and easily retrievable. They are efficiently stored in cryptically-named PKZIP files within client specific or archived directories. To accomplish this, one need only exercise a little effort to be organized, also true with paper files. However, even if the lack of longer file names is a real problem, Windows 95 does not solve that problem, at least no elegantly. Long file name support, as implemented in Windows 95, does not really provide long file names; rather, it provides a long alias or a long file description. Those file descriptions are, in my opinion, poorly implemented by being stored in the directory structures. (Windows 95's implementation of long file names is almost the same as Windows NT's long file names on FAT partitions; while I have much praise for both operating systems -- I love Windows NT -- the same criticism applies to both). A file with a long file name (and many with short file names) now has two (or more, if the name is longer than 12 characters) directory entries rather than one. One directory entry is a short file name and the other directory entries are the long file name. For example, if you create the Excel file "Budget for Jan 1995.XLS" there will also be a directory entry BUDGET~1.XLS. Microsoft would say that BUDGET~1.XLS is an 8.3 alias for the long file name. However, BUDGET~1.XLS is the **real** directory entry that points to the actual file on the drive and the long file name is merely a pointer to the short file name. If I create a separate budget file for each of twelve months, I end up with the mess shown in Table 1.
Table 1 |
