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This is a great article and really illustrates just how hard Windows works to be backwards compatible.

Lots of these (eg: the COM/LPT stuff) could be dropped and wouldn't affect most people either way, but for those things depending on it, it would be a profoundly breaking change.

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Newest versions of Windows do let you use these names.

How new?

'echo foo > COM1' returns 'The system cannot find the file specified.' on Windows 11. (Machine doesn't have a COM1; if this wasn't being redirected to the port, it'd have gone into a file of that name.)

You can now use ".\COM1" or "COM1.txt" but not a bar COM1.

Thanks! That's good to know.

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