Windows 3.x and earlier used what was known as an 8.3 naming scheme, meaning that files had eight places for a name, three for an extension and a dot in the middle. Name decorating is programatically how Windows 3.x and DOS clients interact with files that have more than 8 characters followed by a dot and then three characters for a file extension. Those of us who can remember doing mass migrations of data from Windows 3.x to Windows 9x and/or NT will remember well the naming changes that had to happen to maintain backwards compatibility during this trying time. Especially if we had been using *nix boxen to store…