I have a collection of files from the late ´90s and early ´00s. Many of them are .JPG, .MP3, .WAV, instead of .jpg, .mp3, and .wav. Why was that the norm at the time? I usually just change the extension myself.
Back in the days of DOS/MS-DOS, all filenames were in uppercase and restricted to 8 letter filename and 3 letter extension.
Because Windows was always just built on top of DOS and the FAT filesystem, until NT/Win2000, the actual file naming convention renamed the same.
Windows just held extra metadata to pretend it could have longer filenames.
Windows has always been garbage and ME was particularly bad, but the NT kernel was the right thing to do
Back in the day when affordable homes were very much bigger compared to now. You could splurge a little on hard drives that could store big size letters. Now that affordable homes (tiny condos) are a teeny tiny bit smaller, it makes sense to shrink the size of the letters so that they fit in a smaller space.
Because DOS/early Windows had a filesystem that had very limited filenames. You had eight characters for the actual filename and three for the file extension. They were stored and displayed in all caps, but matching was always case insensitive.
That explains both the upper case and the three character extension limit.
Worth mentioning that this wasn’t a problem on other systems. Unix had long, case-sensitive names before DOS existed.
