"If you're a regular reader of this column, you've likely now mastered much of the UNIX lingo. Colloquialisms such as "pipe the output," "kill the process," and "use a wildcard"--strange phrases to the uninitiated—should be familiar and comfortable.
"Alas, UNIX isn't the only tongue spoken in the machine room. IBM mainframe folks speak cants of "z," such as IBM z/OS and System z9 Virtual Machine (z/VM); harried embedded systems developers jabber in eCos; and still others chit-chat in various argots of UNIX, such as Linux®, FreeBSD, Sun Solaris, and Mac OS X. Modern information technology is a latter-day Babel.
"Of course, a great many also speak the Windows vernacular, although most are versed only in Windows' point-and-click patois. After some 20-odd years of revisions, the predominance of Windows users have forgotten the arcane DOS dialect."
