Interrupt request levels are a fundamental Windows concept. We all know what they are (and if not we should) and interact with them every day, but do we know how to pronounce their acronym “IRQLs”?
Much like most of these terms, you’ll find a few alternate pronounciations. The one that I use is:
Urk wull
With short u sounds.
An alternate pronounciation that you’ll sometimes hear is:
Urkel
(An homage to Steve?)
Lastly, there’s the obvious pronounciation of just sounding out the letters:
I R Q L
Though what fun is that?
The old timesharing minicomputer I used in high school (late seventies) was a PDP-11/60 with RSTS/E. Emulators and images are still available but that’s off the point. The real point is getting a mimeographed copy of RSTS internals for systems programming.
There was a structure known as a FIRQB. Without looking for my mimeos which are in a box with the rest of my fanfold printouts from that era, it was not an IRQL (which would not be exposed as we understand it today) but more like a control block or perhaps a structure that was passed to the RSTS system dispatch table via the SYS() function. (In BASIC. No joke.)
It is pronounced–and I remember this very clearly–”Furk-be!”
Don’t ask why that triggered my memory.