Just a newb question about floppys filename length

[curaga]

I formatted a floppy to vfat (mkdosfs /dev/fd0) and copied some files to it.
When I mounted it on another Linux machine, they were shortened to 8.3.
Why? I remember that win95 stores long filenames on floppies too...

Oh, and they all were gzip'ped, but they remained in 8.3 format even after gunzip'ping.
Isn't gzip supposed to store long filenames?

[curaga]

The gunzip was a Busybox version, does that matter?
Oh and could some moderator delete the other two remaining copies of this post?