system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: In Windows, why can't you use certain symbols when you create a folder name?
gpt
Some characters are reserved so complete path names (e.g. c:\windows\system32\cmd.exe) can be parsed into their drive letter and path components.  Colons are reserved because they are used to denote drive letters and alternate data streams.  Backslashes and slashes are reserved because they denote the end of a folder name. Double quotation marks (") are reserved because they are used in some contexts to enclose filenames that contain spaces.

All other reserved symbols (? < > * | and others) are reserved for historical reasons.