The standard U.S. household wiring design has two 120 volt hot wires and a neutral which is at ground potential. The two 120 volt wires are obtained by grounding the centertap of the transformer supplying the house so that when one hot wire is swinging positive with respect to ground, the other is swinging negative.
Thus the name of a file or directory can be up to 255 characters. When specifying the full path under Windows, you need to prefix the path with \?\ to mark this path as an extended-length one (~32k characters).o be precise: NTFS itself does impose a maximum filename-length of several thousand characters (around 30'000 something). However, Windows imposes a 260 maximum length for the Path+Filename. The drive+folder takes up at least 3 characters, so you end up with 257.
Names must be from 1 to 30 bytes long with these exceptions: Names of databases are limited to 8 bytes. Names of database links can be as long as 128 bytes. If an identifier includes multiple parts separated by periods, then each attribute can be up to 30 bytes long.