Why is this project called "PC DOS/RE" ?
So why is this project called "PC DOS/RE" ? It's based on MS-DOS 4, right?
The answer in a word: Trademarks.
PC DOS was not actually officially called "PC DOS" until version 6 (though it was unofficially called that all the way back to the beginning, and version 3.3 has the string "PC-DOS" stored in the files). And outside the anglosphere, it still said "IBM DOS", the same as it does on 4.0 and later. And there is never a ™ or ® anywhere to be seen on the name "PC DOS" or its logo.
I suspect part of this reason may have to do with clones of PC DOS that used variants of "PC DOS" or "PC-DOS" in their names, like Digital Research's "Concurrent PC DOS" or The Software Link's "PC-MOS".
So the name "PC DOS" was, technically fair game... but I still wanted to differentiate between IBM's PC DOS and my PC DOS, since obviously being forked from an earlier point (PC DOS split from MS-DOS at 5.02), the two are going to be very different. So I decided to add a tag at the end of the name.
The first name I came up with was "PC DOS Resurrection", but the marketroid in me decided it would be better to shorten that. Eventually I came up with "PC DOS/RE", where "RE" could stand for a number of different things: "Resurrection Edition", "Revived Edition", "Retro Edition"... and makes it clear that it's not the original PC DOS as released by IBM, but that it is a derivative of the original PC DOS.
So PC DOS/RE it is.
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