Why is the DOS path character "\"?
I've always felt the better question is "Why is the UNIX path character "/"?People use "/" as a date separator as in 12/25/1979 so effectively banning that character as a character in filenames seems a really poor choices. By that metric chosing "\" is a much better choice because "\" is used no where I know outside of computers. I've never encountered it  anywhere outside of computers so arguable it's the perfect choice for a path character.