There's no doubt that Microsoft has a few hundred thousand dirty little secrets, and one of the more benign ones is the way that DOS still lurks beneath the surface of Windows. (Okay, it's a stretch to call DOS "benign," but we're grading on a curve, here-- at least there are no dead bodies involved.) To say that DOS is still present in Windows 95 (and 98, and Me) is an oversimplification that's not strictly correct, but hey, we're busy people. Oversimplification is a valuable tool that can save hours when properly abused.

But what would you say if we told you that Apple's got a dirty little secret or two itself? No, we're not talking about those rumors of gross impropriety during Uncle Steve's infamous "lost weekend" in Thailand-- we won't even dignify those stories with airtime, because they're hurtful, libelous, and really, really funny despicable. We're talking more along the lines of the "DOS-in-Windows" sort of skeleton in the closet. As you are all well aware, tens of thousands of zany, madcap Mac geeks are poring through the Mac OS X public beta right this second, studying it obsessively from every possible angle, trying to attain a deep, Zen-like understanding of the Future of the Mac. Any search on that scale is bound to uncover a few things that Apple may have wanted to keep hidden. Like, say, any references to DOS in Mac OS X's configuration files...

Say what? Say yeah. The French site MacPlus was spooning around in the Mac OS X soup and found a curious reference to that most hated of command-line-based PC operating systems. Apparently there's an option to set the "button title in alert to confirm restarting the computer into DOS/Windows" called "Restart in DOS." At least, we think that's what's going on-- our high school French is pretty rusty, so we were forced to rely on Altavista's automatic translation function, which, as always, was both helpful and extraordinarily amusing. "And precisely, that the owners of Mac OS Xb will throw an eye in the file located here." Hey, you know us, folks-- we'll throw an eye at anything it'll stick to.

Anyway, before you people go into spasms at the prospect of Mac OS X being based on DOS, relax. The option is clearly labeled "Intel only," which tells us one of two things: either it's just a code remnant left over from the Intel-compatible version of OpenStep, from which Mac OS X was derived, or it's further evidence that Apple continues to play with the possibility of releasing an Intel-compatible version of Mac OS X. Neither possibility is worth bursting a blood vessel over. Still, the whole idea of DOS even being mentioned in Mac OS X has enough gross-out factor to last us a week.