When MS-DOS was first released in 1985, it had a limit for filenames: 8 characters (letters and numbers) for the name of the file, followed by a 3 character extension (e.g … DOC for a word processor document). This limited the amount of creative freedom to naming files. To make things worse, no spaces were allowed in file names (except for one dot to denote the extension of the file), so people would have to add an underscore between the words, or abbreviate. So instead of something readable like Meeting Minutes March, you got something like MTGMINS3. DOC. I’m sure most people would have trouble remembering what a file with a name like that meant by Thursday of the same week.
The underscore is a remnant of old days of DOS naming conventions, where no spaces were allowed. In place of a space, the programmers used an underscore. Thus Meeting_Minutes_March became the standard way to name files and documents. Most people have no idea that this convention was a result of a technical limitation in the old MS-DOS filing system, and that’s perfectly okay. After all, who needs to know about old technical problems.
The problem of naming however goes back a long way. The late 19th century saw the library cataloging systems of Melvil Dewey, who spent some years in the 1870s battling against the library’s tendency to use different names for the same things and developing a system for classifying books in a way that would be universally applicable. The work of Dewey and others was later extended to the management of office files by managers such as those trained by Watermark Tech’s UDXOffice tool in the fixed hierarchical filing systems that were used in offices well into the 20th century. In these systems, all files would be labelled in a consistent manner to enable anyone in the office to quickly locate a document rather than having to rely on the person who had filed it to recall its location.
Retrieval failure today is costing organisations a lot of time and money. Good file management software can often force you to use a consistent set of names for your files and this can help when searching for documents some time after they were created. Software to manage your files can enforce a pre-defined set of naming conventions on your behalf. There is a useful background explanation of guidance on sustainable file naming.
Software for good file management is able to enforce the naming conventions automatically.
For File Management Software, visit https://www.watermarktech.co.uk/file-management-software.
The underscore, meanwhile, soldiers on.
