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C:\Progra~1

They didn't force anything.

Did they intentionally use only folder names with spaces that are at least 9 characters long and with the space after the first 6, so that the 8.3 version contains no spaces?

Pretty clever if so :D

A space in an otherwise 8.3 file name would still be treated as a long file name and get a ~1 shot name alias.

Thanks for the clarification!

I was curious about a deep dive into this topic, and skimmed the MS doc pages after a Google search. They mentioned different Windows APIs and Long file names, but the only mention of the tilde compat layer I found was very superficial ("some file-systems" use the tilde as special character), so I abandoned my initial interest in getting up to speed on this during a 2min weeekend read.

What ‘bout “C:\My Documents” though?

That came later, end of 1996 with OSR2.

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