"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."
