[sf-lug] good article looking at the TomTom case

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Christian Einfeldt (einfeldt at gmail.com):

> Really worth reading
> http://is.gd/l2UG

Oddly enough, I wrote about Microsoft Corp.'s method for storing long
filenames on FAT _in 1995_ -- out of utter shock at finding out just how
pathetic that method is, from the viewpoint of software design.  

You see, Win95 came out, and I was very curious about how they could 
possibly have stored long filenames on FAT, given that I knew all the
data structures and that there just wasn't anywhere to _put_ that
information.  So, I kept asking around and reading documentation,
figuring it had to be covered somewhere.  It wasn't, not even in the
multi-hundred-dollar developers' reference manuals.  And, to my
astonishment, nobody else I talked to seemed to have even _wondered_
about the question.  Everyone else seemed to just take it for granted.

So, just after the Win95 demo, I took a guess at it, in my column as
editor of _Blue Notes_, 36-page monthly magazine of the San Francisco PC
User Group.  Shortly after going to press, though, I found evidence that
my guess had been wrong.  (Oh well.)  So, determined to get to the
bottom of the puzzle, I started studying Win95 directly, eventually
using Norton Utilities -- which, finally, popped out the answer.

The answer was quite appalling -- and was covered in the _next_ month's
(Nov. 1995) column: http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Legacy_Microsoft/win95-bn.html