Somebody asked me the other day what I mean (relative to computers) when I say "PC" and it suddenly occured to me: duh. I have no idea. What I sorta mean is the kind you have, not the kind I have, making the pretty safe assumption you have an Intel-based box running Windows. But not necessarily exactly, it turns out.
"PC" was the name given by IBM to its first entry in the personal computer market, which had been around by then for quite a while (see this entry at the Blinkenlights Archaeological Institute for more). The proprietary BIOS in the IBM PC was immediately reverse-engineered and the "clone" came into being (powered by the happily disremembered MS-DOS, renamed from PC-DOS); as clones acquired respectability they became known, more delicately, as IBM-compatibles; and as IBM's share of the personal computer market declined and eventually vanished the entire class of Intel-based, Microsoft-powered computers came to be known as PCs - in the consumer world, pretty much all the computers in the world except Apple's.
But now, Apple computers run on Intel chips and quite handily run, in addition to the Mac OS, Windows right out of the box. And some used-to-be PCs are built with AMD chips and run other operating systems as well, notably Linux and the various flavors of BSD (which also run happily on Apple hardware, in most cases). So are Macs PCs now or are PCs not? If you see what I mean. I myself have no idea.
But the good news is, today is the last day before tomorrow, which is the release date for Apple's long (in techno terms)-awaited iteration of OS-X, and there will probably be a little Leopard-blogging this weekend.
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