...which in turn was strongly influenced by a previous product from DEC.
"Various aspects of CP/M were influenced by the TOPS-10 operating system of the DECsystem-10 mainframe computer, which Kildall had used as a development environment."
Not exactly - several "killer features" of DOS 2.0 were features inspired by Xenix and which were not present in CP/M, including a /DEV/ directory, the mere concept of hierarchical filesystem and optional use of forward slashes in directory paths - backslashes were introduced because of CP/M legacy in commands
This is an urban myth of computing, and it needs to die.
CP/M commands did not accept command-line switches in any standard way. You are trying to "correct" people who are telling the real story by repeating a myth.
Ah, I seem to have been waylaid by some of the older mentions there - thanks for the link with mention of M-DOS. I was certain of DEC connections, but thought it came through CP/M and forgot to take into account PDP-10 history of Microsoft.
The inspiration rather came from CP/M.