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I suggest that the tags and be synonyms of one another. There are 419 questions tagged and 1147 tagged , with 100 of these tagged both ways.

Most questions that apply to one of these tags apply equally to the other. Users who don't know to check both tags lose out on potentially applicable questions.

(I cannot suggest this in the normal manner because I have reputation in MS-DOS but not DOS.)

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closed as off-topic by CRABOLO, Emrakul, Martijn Pieters, Doorknob, rene Jan 13 at 21:55



[DOS] is now starting to see a questions about Denial-of-Service. two birds-one stone; perhaps we should merge both into [PC-DOS], leaving [DOS] for the attacks? –  Textmode Jul 12 '14 at 14:06

1 Answer 1

I would suggest that technically this qualifies for a manual clean up rather than synonymization as MS-DOS is a variant of a DOS.

DOS stands for Disk Operating System, while MS-DOS is an actual product. While they may be used synonymously, that is more through ignorance than anything else.

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Maybe it is more convention than ignorance. DOS has been used synonymously with MS-DOS and PC-DOS since the early 1980's. With the advent of the IBM-clones, "MS-DOS" gained in popularity, and as the IBM PC declined, so did the name "PC-DOS" and, to a lesser extent, "DOS". Today, there are about 1/3 as many hits for "DOS-Based" on Google as there are for "MS-DOS-Based", close to the DOS/MS-DOS ratio on SO. Any way it happens, it would be an improvement for all the MS-DOS questions to be available under one roof. –  xpda Jan 25 '13 at 4:59
Realistically, anyone with expertise with one of those can be a big help to anyone using any of them. The chances of someone having an issue so obscure that it matters that it is MS-DOS has to be remote. –  doug65536 Jan 25 '13 at 6:39
@xpda: The same as "PC" has pretty much become synonymous with "Microsoft Windows", but that doesn't change the fact that it's not correct. Woah, I've got a dejá vù, I think I did that speech before... –  Time Traveling Bobby Jan 25 '13 at 8:42

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