Comment on Valve Announces New Steam Machine, Steam Controller & Steam Frame
racketlauncher831@lemmy.ml 1 week agoAllow me to be pedantic here. What you were referring to here, “PC”, stands for “personal computer”. It’s a device on where you can perform computation. Sometimes that computation is to render video streams encoded in H.264 onto the screen, and sometimes it happens to take in your control signal to alter that video stream, like video games. You are free to perform any kind of computation on it.
“PC” has no implications of Microsoft or Windows.
Allow me to match your pedantry.
A “denotation” is an exact, codified definition of a word, commonly thought of as a “dictionary definition.”
A “connotation” is a less official but culturally understood meaning of a word, often dependent on context or setting.
“PC” connotes Windows in the gaming world. But thanks for taking time out of your day to tell me what it stands for, etc 🙄
dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Insufficient pedantry detected.
The PC platform is an extension of IBM’s Personal Computer architecture, which was not a description of what it was so much as it was literally the brand name. It’s long since been forgotten that this is now a shorthand, and the full name of the platform arguably out to be PC Compatible. Unless you bought your machine from IBM, anyway, which these days would be quite the trick.
Being PC compatible was a big deal back when the original PC was also a big deal. Probably slightly less so now, since it’s the assumed default.
It should go without saying that the original IBM PC, model 5150, did not run Windows… Because Windows did not yet exist. It didn’t even necessarily run the then-nascent PC-DOS provided by Microsoft, because IBM also supported running CP/M and and UCSD Pascal on it.
The whole Windows-as-default thing didn’t happen until well after the appeal of the PC specification had escaped containment at IBM and x86 had handily taken over the desktop computing world.
A personal computer is basically anything you can stick on your desk (or lap) and doesn’t require hooking up to a mainframe to run. But a Personal Computer, capital P and C, implies an x86 compatible platform with architecture designed such that it is technically still capable of running all those decades old 8086 programs and operating systems. (Just, several orders of magnitude faster than their designers ever envisioned, and probably only by sticking your UEFI BIOS in legacy mode first.)