Re: Off topic: Jargon file

[cld@xxxxxxxx (Carl Distefano)]

Reply to note from Patricia M Godfrey  Sun, 29 Dec
2002 16:12:38 -0500

> if the willing slaves of Redmond say "OS", and rebels against
> that tyranny say "opsys," "OS" will never again cross my lips,
> pen, or keyboard.

I, for one, am not aware of any such connotation. If anything, "OS"
is redolent of Big Blue, which in the 1960's had an operating system
for its (low-end) System/360 line of hardware called, literally, OS.
(It was soon replaced by DOS/360, whose direct descendants, according
to Foldoc, were still in use as recently as 1997. See
http://foldoc.doc.ic.ac.uk/foldoc/foldoc.cgi?query=os.) And later,
of course, there was OS/2. But just as "DOS" has largely shed its
proprietary connotations, "OS", too, has become a generic term. For
what it's worth (granted, not much), Foldoc has a definition for OS,
but nothing for OpSys.

I prefer "OS". It's short and to the point; everyone immediately
knows what you mean. What's so euphonious about "OpSys"? It's a
mouthful of consonants, and a little too like "SysOp" for my taste.

--
Carl Distefano
cld@xxxxxxxx
http://users.datarealm.com/xywwweb/