What the OP said:
| How do you leave windows to return to DOS prompt?
How do you "leave" Windows without "exiting"? Basic English. You are
interpolating what you think he wanted with what he actually said. You may
be right, in the end, but it is he who used ambiguous English. Let him
return to the thread to disambiguate his statement; don't be putting words
in his mouth that you think he may have meant, unless you are privy to
knowledge that the rest of us mortals have not.
It's a metaphor, my china, and Windows uses lots of metaphors, in order to
make it "user friendly" and enable the user to avoid having to know all about
the underlying intricacies of the operating system.
Windows uses paper file folders as a metaphor for directories, which is a bit
like early cars having reins coming through the dashboard and a socket for a
whip.
The letter kills, but the spirit gives life, and Windows uses too many
metaphors as it is, but it's in the spirit of Windows to do so, and so if the
user wants to leave the GUI in order to give commands to the operating system,
so be it. He doesn't necessarily want to close Windows, just not work through
it for the moment. Originally the GUI ran on top of the operating system, now
it is more integrated, but for the purpose of what the user wants to do, it
doesn't matter. The spirit of Windows is to try to be user friendly. It
doesn't always succeed, but it doesn't need people deliberately trying to make
it user hostile.