Allison J Parent said... | |DOS used to be a generic as well for "disk operating system". Technically, it still is generic. The problem was when the PC (a term that should have stayed generic, but IBM managed to co-opt) was mass marketed, the masses couldn't deal with the fact tat there were two DOS versions available (PC-DOS and MS-DOS), so they just started saying "DOS". The trade press, of course, used DOS generically, but as the trade press moved into the mass market, where people were only looking at the PC stuff (for the most part), where DOS refered to whatever xxDOS was running, and the actual OS was only mentioned when necessary, the masses naturally came to assume DOS meant "the OS running on my IBM PC". Since MS eventually won that war, the masses assumed DOS was short for MS-DOS. SO when I see DOS in a group like this, I generally assume it means "Disk Operating System", unless otherwise specified. The Compucolor, an dthe Apple ][, for instance, both ran a DOS that was tied in with BASIC. Not exactly what's running on your average Intel-compatible-processor-based system today. -Miles Language is schizo. As technologists, we dare not let it slide into meaninglessness and fluid slang with ever-changing meaning. As members of society, who have to deal with those who are not technologists, we sometimes have no choice but to speak the language as they do.