Mac OS X Leopard Phrasebook

Chapter 10. Working with Disks

Deep down, Mac OS X—like every other operating system—is about disks. From the days of the first consumer OSes published for desktop computers, the term Disk Operating System, or DOS, was at the heart of the vocabulary every computer owner had to know. The operating system was a mechanism for formatting, mounting, and navigating the floppy disks you could stick in your computer (in contrast to the cassette tapes and other clumsy media that preceded them). Running applications was almost a secondary function when it was amazing enough just to be able to store a novel’s worth of text on a 5.25-inch square of plastic.

These days, disk is a term whose definition runs the gamut from traditional floppy disks (if you can ...