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DEC's TOPS-10 had six chars plus a three char extension - 6.3

CP/M and MS-DOS extended this to a much more generous 8.3

TRSDOS for the TRS-80 line of computers was like CP/M heavily influenced by TOPS-10. It allowed 8 characters names with a 3 letter extension but used “/“ instead of “.” as the separator.

I worked at an F500 company a couple years ago that still restricts all its email addresses to 8 characters because those double as your corporate ID and sometimes got used in Unix systems with an 8-character restriction. I don’t know if they still have any systems with that restriction. They probably don’t know either, and it has become a cargo cult.

This wasn't even that long ago if you were on Solaris. We used to be a Solaris shop, and even though we migrated our last Solaris boxes to Linux about 7 years ago, most of our usernames still adhere to the 8 character limit for the sake of consistency.

I was wondering whether this was strongly tied to the initial file name limit, since home directories were named after the user.

And what do you mean "old enough", I still had new support accounts restricted to 8 characters by clients this year. ;)