Change PC to Win or Windows

[Derek Martin]

On Sat, Jul 19, 2008 at 02:56:07AM -0700, Lie wrote:
> On Jul 19, 6:14 am, Derek Martin <c... at pizzashack.org> wrote:
> > On Fri, Jul 18, 2008 at 03:46:13PM -0700, Joel Teichroeb wrote:
> > Much like the English word "bank" (and numerous others), the term "PC"
> > has come to have several meanings, one of which is the above.  You may
> > not like it, but we're pretty much stuck with the term, so you may as
> > well get used to it.
>
> That's not the point, 

It very much IS the point.  Language evolves based on common usage
patterns of the people who use it.  The term "PC" is commonly used in
English, in the United States and other English speaking countries, to
mean a computer running Microsoft Windows.  That's a simple fact that
you can not escape, no matter how much you may not like it (it just so
happens that I also don't like it, but I realized long ago the
futility of arguing against its usage).  It's still a fact, and I
described roughly how that fact came to be.  It wasn't something that
Apple started; it's been used this way in increasingly common usage
for at least 20 years, although exactly what combination of hardware
and software was being refered to as a "PC" has evolved over that
timeframe.

PC was a short form of "personal computer", which is how IBM came up
with the name.  Nevertheless, with the ubiquity of IBM hardware, and
subsequent popularity of clones running Microsoft operating systems,
the term "PC" has, in the present day, come to mean "a personal
computer based on Intel-compatible hardware running a flavor of
Microsoft Windows."  It is used this way by the consumer computer
industry, and it is used this way by the common population.  Ipso
facto "PC" means a windows box, in common English usage today.

You don't have to like it, and you don't even have to acknowledge it.
But if you choose not to, or argue against using it that way, you're
in denial, plain and simple.  

-- 
Derek D. Martin
http://www.pizzashack.org/
GPG Key ID: 0x81CFE75D

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