Ken's Dictionary of Computer Standards
An in-depth dictionary explaining certain basic concepts, specifications and
de facto standards of the computer industry.
Source:
Ken. All definitions come
from actual experience and personal research. If you find it useful,
please fill out this
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- ANSI
- n. The American National
Standards Institute. An organization that uses
the public Internet and donated time from University and Industry
researchers, and then sells the resulting standards documents
only by mail-order. ANSI sales can be reached at:
ANSI Sales Department
1430 Broadway
New York, NY 10018
(212) 642-4900
- Application
- n. A software program or system of programs designed
to fulfill a specific user
requirement. Categories of
applications include Spreadsheets for bookkeeping, Word Processors for
documents, and Databases for recordkeeping.
- ASCII
- n. 1. The American Standard Code for
Information Interchange. Originally a 6 bit computer code
representing capital English (Roman) letters and punctuation,
expanded to 7 bits to include lower case and additional symbols. The
Open Systems competitor to EBCDIC, IBM's proprietary text code. Also
known as ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1),
ANSI X3.4-1968, and ANSI X3.110-1983.
2. A consortium of Value Added Resellers.
3. A large Japanese firm,
also with the same name.
- ATAPI
- n. 1. The
ATA
Programmer's Interface.
A set of SCSI-like commands designed to address a
CDROM drive over
an IDEinterface. Allows users to
install and use a CDROM drive in much the same manner as a hard
disk.
- Base Address
- n.
An industry-wide specification for the documentation of
I/O Ports where
the total number of addresses is never mentioned, only the first,
or Base Address.
- Benchmark
- n. 1. A
quantifiable, reproducible measurement of computer system
operation. 2. Marketing A way to make your product
look better, usually by way of unfair comparison. For example,
comparing 350mg aspirin to 500mg, or application performance on
Intel Win/NT versus on PowerPC Win/NT, but running in Intel
emulation mode, etc.
- Beta Test
- n. A phase of
Product Delivery allowing
users to report bugs in a commercial
program. Also, for Device Drivers, a release strategy, where
unfinished drivers are released to the public, in the hopes that
knowledgeable individuals will dissassemble, repair them, and return
their efforts for free.
- Binary
- n. 1. A
base 2 numerical system, using any of several notational systems.
Ideally suited to computer use. Negative numbers can be internally
represented in fixed-size binary systems using one's complement
or two's complement notation, the latter winning out in modern
computers due to simplicity of hardware implementation.
2. Any kind of
computer data that is not plain readable text (such as ASCII or EBCDIC).
Usually, but not necessarily, compiled executable code.
- BIOS
- n. A specification for
a 16 Bit program that boots 32 and 64 bit PC's, and cannot contain
a boot manager, diagnostics, or command line monitor. The BIOS
specification also requires that PC's cannot boot directly off of
alternate disk partitions, alternate disks, CD ROMS, tapes, Bernoulli's,
flopticals, or other storage devices.
- Bus
- A system for connecting one or more CPUs
to various peripherals and I/O
devices, involving parallel data transfer through standardized
connectors to multiple devices. All modern computers are based
on the Von Neumman bus architecture, which accesses memory and
peripherals in the same logical manner. The Harvard bus
architecture is used on most computer systems that have
CPU's greatly faster than their peripherals.
While appearing logically the same,
RAM is accessed on one bus at a much faster speed than periperhals
on another bus.
- Cascaded Interrupt
- n. An Interrupt Request line reserved by the system
(in the IBM PC architecture)
for notifying the first interrupt controller that the second
has received an interrupt. Used by VGA cards for the Vertical
Retrace Interrupt, and the default IRQ setting for most LAN cards.
- CCITT
- n. Consultative Comittee International
Telephone and Telegraph. A defunct European
standards organization, made up of state-controlled Telephone
Companies and no commercial entities, that rubber-stamped
delineations of existing European telephony practices.
- CD ROM
- n. Compact Disk Read
Only Memory. A storage medium based on the digital
music recording specification. There are two basic specifications,
High Sierra, and ISO 9660, which may be made interoperable with
the Rock Ridge extensions.
- CD ROM drive
- n.
A device used for loading large programs from
CD ROM
and sharing interrupts with LAN cards. Newer CD ROM players
allow you to replace a Hard Disk with a CD ROM drive and search
endlessly for device drivers when upgrading to Win95.
- Context
- n. The environment in which a process runs, including
it's set of register values within the CPU,
the current stack values, which instruction is being executed, and
the allowable memory access boundaries.
A context switch is a sudden change in these, for example,
a function call which modifies the stack, registers, and instruction
pointer simultaneously, or a CPU's switch from executing one
process to another, which produces similar effects.
- Context Sensitive Help
- n.
Information about where you are
in the application, which is not where you want to be. Often
describes how to use the mouse and the menus to select things
you don't want (required in User Friendly software).
- COTS
- n. Commercial Off The Shelf.
A government purchasing term requiring commercial
availability of products bought on contract. An attempt to
avoid "cost-plus contract" minded defense contractors
from making custom systems that only they can maintain.
- Cost Plus
- n. 1. The ultimate goal of every government
contractor. 2. The foundation of the USA's
military-industrial complex. 3. A type of contract where
all Research & Development
expenses are charged to the government, whatever they are,
in addition to fees.
- CPU
- n. Central Processing Unit 1.
The Microchip containing the Arithmetic Logic Unit, Decoder,
registers, etc. that decodes and executes machine-level commands
inside the Computer System. 2. The set of circuit boards of a
mainframe containing these
elements. 3. slang The system case containing the above.
CPU's are classified by their instruction set width, integer
data register size, data bus width, address bus width, and the
clock speed at which they access data.
- CPU Cache
- n. Fast Static RAM
that provides 0 wait state (next clock cycle) access to memory
for the CPU. The number of wait states is calculated by the
reciprocal of the clock speed, e.g. 1/33MHz = .000 000 030 S
or 30+ NanoSeconds. For a Pentium 100, 1/100MHz = .000 000 010 S
or 10 nS. However, advertising standards require 100 MHz Pentiums
to claim 0 wait state caches when implemented with 15 nS SRAMS.
- Device Driver
- n.
1. Low-level software that provides an interface between
Operating Systems and the hardware devices.
Created to allow for device-independent applications, they must
be replaced whenever a new or updated application is installed.
2. A mechanism of planned obsolesence, where new
operatings systems released without device driver support for
older hardware.
- DMA
- n. Direct Memory Access.
The ability of an I/O device to write directly to the
computer's RAM, bypassing the slow, CPU intensive
Port I/O. On the PC architecture, DMA
channels come in 8 bit and 16 bit varieties. Some are prereserved
by design (for example, the floppy drives), while others at system
configuration time, like for a sound card.
- EISA
- n. The Extended Industry
Standard Architecture. A computer
expansion bus used in
high end 386 and 486 PC's and some Hewlett-Packard Workstations.
A non-proprietary industry-wide attempt to counter
IBM's MicroChannel bus. A bus width of 64 bits allowed a 33 MB/S
transfer rate, making it ideal for file server computers with high
disk I/O rates. Unfortunately the 8.25MHz bus speed made for high
latency in small transfers,
leading to poor video performance compared to the 32 bit,
33 MHz VESA Local bus.
- Emoticon
- n. A picture built out of ASCII
characters, often sideways, used in human-to-human electronic
communications, such as e-mail, chat, and IRC.
The use of emoticons is intended to compensate for the lack of evocative,
emotional content in computer text. The most popular type of
emoticon is the smiley face.
- Flash BIOS
- n. An
user-upgradable memory device (required not to have the usual
BIOS
identification code and therefore undetectable by memory managers)
that is mapped into a PC's upper memory and conflicts with programs
that the memory manager loades over top of it. Used to implement
Plug-n-Play and other quickly
changing specifications.
- FUD
- n. Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.
The object of marketing campaigns launched by otherwise
uncompetitive companies.
- FUD Factor
- n. The threshold of confusion in a market sufficient
to allow an uncompetitive company to prepare products, while users delay
purchasing. See White Paper.
- Grammar Checker
- n. An application feature that
is used precisely once in the lifetime of an application.
Grammar Checkers explain to the user in
Post-Graduate level English why the writing is at a Third Grade level.
- HTML
- n. HyperText MarkUp Language.
The standard language for
publishing text on the World Wide Web. Using an
ASCII text editor or
HTML editor, an author "Marks Up" text with formatting
codes and codes for hypertext links to other material. These
codes are interpreted by the user's browser, not the publisher's server,
with the intent of providing device-independent output. As such,
HTML was not intended to precisely control page layout, which
fonts are used, etc. Standards include original HTML (sometimes
called "1.0" or "strict"), HTML 2.0 (just
now completely standardized), an ongoing HTML 3.0 specification
process, uncompleted, and Netscape HTML 2.5/3.0, proprietary dialects.
HTML 3.0 is changing some definitions (the paragraph separator is
now the paragraph encapsulator, for example), but some would
have you believe that HTML 3.0 is 100% faithful, unchanging
and absolute.
- IDE
- n. Integrated Drive Electronics.
A standard for interfacing Hard Disks to PC, placing the controller
on the drive itself, like SCSI drives. From a programming standpoint,
it is another ST-506 compatible system, based on the interface
for the original 5 Megabyte
Shugart hard disk of the 8 bit PC. Unlike SCSI, only two disks
are allowed per IDE interface, though a tape or
CDROM may be added to a secondary
IDE interface. Installing a second drive causes the transfer rate of
IDE to drop. On manually configured IDE controllers, the new
transfer rate must be configured or transparent corruption of data
will being immediately (without warning from DOS or Windows). On
autoconfiguring controllers, one has to hope that it adjusts.
IDE has been superceded by EIDE (Extended IDE, Western
Digital's superset specification for IDE) and
ATA (Seagate's and Quantum's name for extensions to IDE). Both add
Logical Block Addressing, native support for tape and CDROM,
faster transfer rates, Plug-n-play, and scatter/gather requesting (though
very little system software actually is capable of issuing a
scatter/gather disk command). EIDE and ATA are essentially compatible.
An excellent FAQ about both is
here.
- Installation
- n. The process of configuring new hardware, software or
both to work on a computer. See Support.
- IntelliSense
- n. An application feature that
automatically changes the abbreviation MHz (for Mega Hertz)
incorrectly to Mhz.
- Internal Modem
- n. A telecommunications device
that renders your mouse inoperative and cannot be used at the
same time as your LAN card.
- I/O Port
- n. (historical,
An Intel I/O concept, used by 4 and 8 bit MPU's.) A location in a
separate memory address map maintained for CPU/device communication.
Each device's I/O ports must be uniquely assigned within the map.
I/O ports come in sets of 2, 4, 8, 16 and 32,
and are referred to only by their Base Address.
Often used in PC's in conjunction
with memory-mapped I/O, where I/O Ports form the control channel, and
memory access forms the data channel. Except for PCs, totally obsoleted
by memory-mapped I/O. Currently used in DEC's 250MHz Alpha PC.
- IRQ
- n. Interrupt ReQuest.
A set of 16 lines on the PC Bus, that when
asserted by the I/O device, notifies the CPU that the device
is in need of servicing. IRQ's 2 and 9 are ganged, as this
is the way that the PC architecture was extended from
the 8 bit 8 IRQ "PC/XT" bus to the 16 bit 286
"AT" bus. On most 32 bit protected mode operating
systems, peripherals cannot share an IRQ, as the OS would not
know which of the two peripherals needed servicing. All internal
modems installed on Com3 or Com4 are attempting to share an
IRQ with Com1 or Com2, respectively.
- ISO
- n. The International Standards
Organization, the European version of
ANSI, but
driven primarily by government-controlled Telephone Companies.
The group responsible for OSI.
- JCL
- n. Job Control Language.
The batch file and script language of the IBM 360, 370, 390
and ES/9000 family mainframes, though the acronym was used
by other manufacturers as well. It's role has been assumed
on other architectures by DOS Batch, UNIX's Bourne shell and PERL,
and Windows'... oops.
- Ken's Law
- An axiom by Ken,
namely, "No matter
how fast your new CPU, software has all ready been written to make
it seem slow." 1986
- Keyboard
- n. An
input device used heavily by computer professionals and optimized for
use by non-typists. Most of the industry loosely
follows the typewriter-styled "IBM 101" standard introduced
with the PS/2. DEC uses its own TFTISDOTRJPUEKLTKWTSSB standard,
or "Twelve Fingered Twelve-Inch-Spread
Dual Opposable-Thumb Reverse-Jointed-Pinky
Unmarked-Escape-Key /
Less-Than-Key-Where-The-Shift-Should-Be".
Computer keyboards usable by touch-typists are made only
by the nearly defunct Northgate, Inc.
- Latency
- n. The amount of time that passes before something
starts to happen. An important consideration in performance evaluation,
where high throughput computer devices often postpone tranfers due
to protocol transaction
overhead, contention and other factors.
- LAN Manager
- n. A LAN OS rumoured to be used
by some companies, perhaps in foreign countries.
- Local Bus
- n. 1.
A high speed internal data-transfer component of
modern computers, operating at the external clock speed of the
CPU. 2. Marketing Any
bus which runs faster then the 8 MHz ISA bus.
3. A bus in 133 MHz Pentium PC's, designed to share
one interrupt between all of the heaviest I/O devices. All
modern Local Busses are advertised to run at CPU speed.
Current Local Bus standards include PCI (32 bit bus w/ MicroChannel
type connector) and VESA (32 bit bus, extended ISA connectors).
Specified speeds of VESA and PCI busses are 33MHz, but sometimes they
are run at 40 MHz. A 66 MHz PCI specification is available but
is difficult to implement.
- MainFrame
- n. 1. A large computer featuring
downloadable microcode, rich I/O paths, substantial integrity
enforcement, degradated mode capability, multiple virtual
machines, and terabyte address spaces. 2. The central
patch panel for a facility's cabling system. 3. slang
Any computer bigger then a PC or Macintosh. See also
MiniComputer.
- Manufacturer
- n. 1. A commercial entity that imports, labels,
and markets goods, expecting VAR's
to support them. See OEM. 2.
A factory for hire in a developing country, with accomodating labor
and environmental laws.
- MicroComputer
- n. 1. A computer designed for use
by a single user, employing a single chip Processing Unit with
fixed microcode and a single-user operating system. 2.
An embedded system employing a single chip CPU.
- MIME
- n. Multi-purpose Internet Mail
Extensions. A developing standard, specified in RFC 1521.
MIME
compliant mailers allow a user to encode an object and specify
a viewer type for that object, and then mail the object to
someone who has neither the proper decoder nor viewer on their
own MIME-compliant system.
- MiniComputer
- n. 1.
Any multi-user computer employing
one or more single chip CPU's, fixed microcode, memory management
unit and
multitasking operating system.
2. A computer larger then a
MicroComputer
but smaller than a
Mainframe.
- MS Windows
- n. See also
Win95.
Any of five versions of a graphical operating environment
that enables Task Switching between
Productivity Applications.
Also, an extended memory manager that allows DOS to load
four Megabyte EXE's plus 10 Megabytes of DLL's for one
application (see Word Perfect for Windows.)
See also Ken's Law.
- Mouse
- adj. An input device
designed to increase the hand-eye coordination of the
user. Also,
the required subject of 40 to 50% of
User Friendly documentation.
- Multitasking
- 1. adj. The ability
to download software from the
Internet while running productivity applications.
2. n. A multiple process Operating
System scheme which relies on computer hardware to efficiently and
safely share computer resources between applications.
See Task Switching.
- Multi-user
- adj. 1. A pejorative
used against UNIX type systems, as
in, "you really don't want the overhead of a multi-user OS."
2. The ability to remotely log-in, diagnose and repair
software problems.
- NeWS
- n. Sun Microsystem Inc.'s Network Extensible
Windowing System, an obsolete desktop metaphor
User Interface manager,
superceded by OpenWindows, which in turn has been replaced by
OSF/Motif. After DEC and IBM adopted MIT's
X Windowing System and funded the OSF
to write Motif, Sun saw it's
Postscript-based NeWS relegated to proprietary status, with only minor
UNIX Workstation players like Sony and AT&T licensing it. Sun then
adopted X but opted to write their own Window Manager and high level
API for it, called OpenWindows.
- Non-Deterministic
- adj A mathematical term
used to describe the installation of
network software
on MS Windows.
- Novell Netware
- n. A LAN OS highly optimized for
network disk emulation that is installed to do everything else.
- Object Oriented
- adj. Used to describe software
that is highly geared towards distributor level marketing. Since
all software is written for
financial gain, the "Object" is sales, and the packaging is
"Oriented" to achieving this. Also used to mistakenly identify
early-binding programming environments that are not quite totally
unlike Eiffel.
- OEM
- n. Original Equipment
Manufacturer. 1. n. A
manufacturer of unbranded products.
2. A reseller that brands unbranded products. 3.
adj. Unbranded. 4. v. To brand and resell an
unbranded product. By definition,
no post-sale support or driver updates are available for OEM products.
- OpenWindows
- n. Sun Microsystem Inc.'s desktop metaphor manager
for the X Windowing System. It features
three-click cut and paste incompatible with most existing
X applications that need only one click per operation. It also
features an API different than Sun's
SunView and
NeWS, the first two obsolete Sun
Graphical User Interfaces.
- OSI
- n. The Open Systems Interconnect
family of specifications, an attempt by the
ISO
to dictate TelCo style networking standards for non-existent
products. Taken up by the U.S. Government in the form of
GOSIP
(Government OSI Purchasing/Profile), this initiative failed when
only two US manufacturers came up with non-interoperable products. All
higher-level network protocols have been totally supplanted by the
TCP/IP family.
- PC Card
- n. A Hardware and Software specification for
small add-in cards for portable PC's. It builds on the
old PCMCIA technology that failed to work correctly.
- Plug-n-Play
- n. A Hardware specification for PC's that dynamically
changes the DMA, IRQ,
I/O Ports and Memory Mapping of
computer devices to settings that non plug-n-play devices
occupy, or where either device drivers or applications are
unable to use. Plug and play works by having each PnP card
output a bit stream containing a unique serial number for
its type, into I/O Port 203 bit One. Each card re-reads the
port, and stops the stream when the number differs. Eventually,
all the cards back off except for one, which completes its
serial number registration, and is registered by the BIOS.
The remaining cards then continue and try it again. If a device
occupies Port 203, (like an extended functionality game card),
all cards will retry on the next highest port, until a free port
is found. Some cards, however, only retry a few ports, instead
of continuing until a free port is found.
- POP
- n. 1. Post Office
Protocol, levels
1, 2 and 3. A protocol that should allow Internet users to
access their SMTP-compliant server's mailbox from any client.
2. A system that doesn't work when any one part of the
ISP's hardware is down or misconfigured. 3.
Point of Presence. A location where an
ISP or TelCo has an access point for a particular service.
- POP
- n. Point Of
Presence. A location where a phone company
or Internet ISP provides access to their equipment,
typically through a modem bank. Ideally, an ISP has
one or more POPs local to each area code that they
market to.
- Product Conception
- n. The realization that a marketing opportunity
exists.
- Product Delivery
- n. A series of steps taken to bring a product
to market, usually encompassing
Conception,
Introduction,
Research & Development,
Product Release,
Testing, and
Obsolescence.
- Product Introduction
- n. The second phase of Product Delivery, where glossy
photographs and tentative specifications are released to
magazines.
- Product Release
- n. A phase of Product Delivery, when products ship
from the manufacturer to
distributors and VAR's. Often
confused with Product Introduction.
- Product Testing
- n. Sometimes the fifth phase of
Product Delivery, occuring
only when VAR orders decline sharply
due to the unusability of the product.
- Product Obsolescence
- n. The last phase of Product Delivery, where the
only options for product disposition are warehousing,
charitable contribution or markets in developing nations.
- Productivity Application
- n.
Spreadsheets, functional WYSIWYG Word Processors, and other software that
contributes directly to the success of a commercial enterprise. Does not include
Word Perfect for Windows.
- Protocol
- n. A standardized method of communication and negotiation.
Every type of computer data transfer and network communication,
internal or external, is done according to one or more protocols.
- Protocol Stack
- n. (Derived from Stack of Cards,
a reference to House of Cards) A group of continually
growing programs and drivers that are installed in every
possible permutation in attempts to give multiple network
protocol support to MS Windows.
See ODI, NDIS, NDIS2, NDIS3,
VLM, CONFIG.SYS, AUTOEXEC.BAT, .386, .SYS, TSR, LH, DEVICEHIGH,
and Packet Driver.
- Production
- n. A
description of a product's development status during the
release phase, marking the end of
Research & Development.
The same as
Beta Test, except that there
exists no mechanism for users to
report bugs.
- Quality
- n. 1. The theoretical concept of delivering
superior products, usually through some sort of statistical
control method. 2. Marketing Countering bad reviews
and user complaints by loudly extending the warranty period for
new purchasers only.
- Requirements
- n. 1. The product of a System Analyst's analysis
of user's needs. 2. Arbitrary
constraints for a computer system, including financial limits,
preferential and experiential judgements, contracting loopholes,
compatability with legacy systems, and security concerns.
3. A list of a computer system product's capabilities
defined after product release.
- Research & Development
- n. 1. Marketing The process of procuring
legal opinions on infringement, liability and restraint of trade.
2. Engineering The process of determining which
off-shore manufacturer to choose.
3. v. Contracting Building company infrastructure
through R&D-billed spending, at the expense of the client.
- RISC
- n. Reduced Instruction Set
Computer. Computer studies in the late 1970's showed
that production CPU's spent most of
their non-productive time in store and fetch operations to
main memory (primary storage). By reducing the functionality
and complexity of the instruction set, RISC CPU architectures
take only one clock cycle per instruction, insuring that
almost all of the processor time is spent waiting for fetch
and store I/O.
- SCO
- n. The Santa Cruz Operation.
1. The official archiver
of obsolete flavors of UNIX.
2. The company behind the
failure of the ARC initiative, when it discovered it didn't know
how to port UNIX SVR4 to the MIPS R4000 RISC CPU. 3. A company
partly bankrolled by Microsoft to promote UNIX in a way favorable to
Microsoft. 4. The company that dropped 90 day installation
support on it's flagship product
because it was costing them too much money. 5. A company
whose UNIX has a fraction of the device driver
support of
a non-commercial UNIX, namely Linux. 6. A company that
expects it's VAR's to support it's
product, though most of the bugs require kernel source code to fix.
7. The company that punished its users by telling them
to reinstall the Operating System when encountering an update
limitation, 6 months after I had furnished them with a simple fix.
- Scroll Arrow
- n. A graphical pseudo-device
MS Windows users learn to employ
after giving up on the
Scroll Bar.
- Scroll Bar
- n. A
graphical psuedo-device,
the required subject of at least 10% of the content of
User Friendly documentation. Used as an aid to build
MS Window's users' hand-eye coordination (see Mouse).
Also, (X/Motif only), a useful graphical psuedo-device
nearly independent of user skill.
- SCSI
- n. The Small Computer Systems
Interface. 1. A parallel
Input Output bus used on most mini-computers for attaching
peripherals such as disks, CDROMS, tape drives, and other high
throughput devices. The original SCSI specification allows
for at least one Host Adapter (the interface to the CPU), and six
other Controllers on the bus, each of which can control devices or
be another CPU's Host Adapter. A Controller in turn may control
several devices, each of which may be a Host Adaptor to another SCSI
bus, or a peripheral
device (disk, tape drive, etc.). 2. Any of several upwardly compatible
standards, including SCSI I (original 5 MHz 8 bit bus spec), SCSI II
(extended command set), wide SCSI (16 bit data path), fast SCSI
(10 MHZ bus), and SCSI III (including all of the previous). 3.
PC SCSI:
A separate standard not allowing multiple host adapters, multiple
devices per controller, or peripherals manufactured after the date
of the host adapter. Used on high-end PC's.
- SMTP
- n. The Simple Mail Transfer
Protocol. 1. A specification given in
RFC #821
for UNIX-style e-mail to be exchanged via several kinds of
network transfer services, usually TCP.
- Solaris
- n. A product of SunSoft, a division of Sun Microsystems
Incorporated (SMI). An SVR4.0 based operating system for SPARC CPU
RISC workstations, the product of a collaboration between
AT&T and Sun. This collaboration allowed AT&T to reintroduce many
of the ancient System V bugs that had been weeded out of Sun's
formerly BSD-based code, along with introducing some new ones.
- Solaris 86
- n. A product of SunSoft, division of Sun Microsystems
Incorporated (SMI). An attempt by Sun to limit support problems
for PC Unix by a.) limiting the supported machines to a single
obsolete configuration, and b.) making it unaffordable to the average
PC user by requiring 32 MB of RAM just to boot. This product is
most curious because Sun purchased Interactive's SVR4.0 UNIX,
took it off the market,
re-released Interactive SVR3.2, and made people wait a few years
before reintroducing SVR4.0 as Solaris 86, supporting only
three-year-old PC hardware devices.
- Spell Checker
- n. An application feature that
users rely on to correct their grammar.
The de facto industry
standard requires the Spell Checker's dictionary to contain all
the words in the English language except computer terminology
and competing vendor's product names.
- SPRINT LINK
- n. The purveyors of sprint.net, an organization that
feels that weekly router collapse and daily ongoing packet delays of
30 seconds to 3 minutes is an acceptable level of service.
- Stepwise Principle
- n.
Releasing hardware-supporting software for the
previous generation of hardware. antonym, Beta
Testing. The industry standard software support model for
PC Operating Systems and some Video Card vendors. For example,
a 32 bit Video Accelerator is introduced
with 16 bit drivers, and stable 32 bit drivers
are shipped only when 64 bit V.A.'s are introduced (also with 32
bit drivers). Stable 64 bit drivers will be available for the
64 bit hardware only when the 128 bit video hardware ships, and so on.
See also SCO.
- SunView
- n. Sun Microsystem Inc.'s original desktop metaphor
User Interface manager. SunView, like MS Windows, was not
operable over a network in Client/Server fashion (where the
display server and the application server are different machines.)
Threatened by innovative machines like the Apollo, Sun wrote
NeWS to replace SunView. XView
is a compatility library Sun has released into the public domain,
enabling developers who didn't port to NeWS or
OpenWindows to port old SunView programs
to the X Windowing System.
- Super Scalar
- n. A type of RISC CPU that
executes multiple instructions simultaneously. This type of CPU must
recognize intruction sequences that are sequentially dependent
and suspend operation of the dependent instruction. Optimizing
Compilers that reduce these dependencies are very important for the
best performance of super scalar CPU's. This type of multiple
instruction processing is not considered multi-processing, because
instructions are typically within the same
context or
thread.
- Support
- n. 1. The business activity that turns profitable
products into unprofitable ones, and vice-versa. 2. The
process of reducing user questions into three categories,
a.) known problems with answers, b.) unsupported configurations,
and c.) further profitable opportunities.
- Sound Board
- n. A device that synthesizes
tones and shares interrupts with printer ports.
- Task Switching
- 1. adj.
The ability to start to downloading
software from the Internet, and then watch a productivity application
crash. 2. n. A multiple process scheme which relies
on each application to cooperatively yield the CPU to allow other
applications to run simultaneously. See
Multitasking.
- Third Party
- n. 1. Any company that is not Microsoft or IBM.
2. Any small company that pioneers an innovative
technology, which will be immediately countered with a
White Paper and later be superseded
by an inferior version bundled in the Operating System.
- Thread
- n. 1. One of several paths of execution inside
a single process or context.
Threaded programs allow background
and foreground action to take place without the overhead of
launching multiple processes or inter-process communication. Also
known as Light Weight Processes. 2. A series of supposedly
related articles posted to one or more Usenet newsgroups.
- Two dot Oh
- n. The threshold
at which experienced professionals begin to consider purchasing.
- UNIX
- n. A boot strap
program written to load an adventure
game on a DEC PDP-8, modified by an astronomer, an archer,
and a mathematician to demonstrate that all computing can
be done on a PDP-11 in less then 10 keystrokes. Trademark of
X/Open, Ltd. Modern reference implementations available include Berkely
Source Distribution 4.4, by UC Berkeley, and SVR4.3, 32 bit by SCO
and 64 bit by Hewlett Packard.
- USB
- n. 1. Universal Serial Bus.
n. 1. A cooperative vendor standard
(Compaq, Digital Equipment Corp, IBM, PC Co., Intel, Microsoft, NEC and Northern Telecom.)
designed to support higher transfer speeds to
Plug-n-Play peripherals than current
serial (RS232C) and parallel ports, at lower cost than
SCSI. 2. An implementation
of such on a PC Motherboard with no connectors, software, or
USB hardware to take advantage of it.
- User
- n. 1. A person trying to derive usefulness out of an
application. 2. Someone not
functioning primarily as a programmer,
marketer, installer or maintainer of software. 3. Theoretically,
the originator of requirements.
4. The financial foundation of the computer business.
- User Friendly
- n.
1. Specification for software to include
Context Sensitive Help,
three manuals and twenty hypertext documents on how to use the mouse,
menus and buttons. Does not address documentation
about installation errors, crashes, or actual functionality.
2. Software designed to be easy to learn and comprehend,
with absolutely no thought to speed of use, ease of repetitive
actions, or workflow.
Also adj. a sales term, see Object Oriented.
- VAR
- n. Value Added Reseller. A commercial
entity that expects the manufacturer
to support the products it sells.
- VESA
- n. The Video Electronics Standards
Association,
home page. An
industry association responsible for designing the VESA Local Bus
specification and standardizing various aspects of PC video
cards and video programming interfaces. Standards are available
for download in
Adobe Acrobat format.
- Video Accelerator
- n.
A hardware component on a
Video Card that is designed to consume
all Local Bus bandwidth.
Video Accelerators' software device drivers
are often released according
to the Stepwise Principle.
- Video Card
- n. A hardware device that requires
bi-monthly driver updates.
- VRML
- n. Virtual Reality Modeling
Language. 1. The quickest way to crash a Netscape browser.
2. A developing technology, developed to guarantee a continuing
lack of Internet bandwidth.
- White Paper
- 1. n. A scholarly paper discussing a state-of-the-art
subject. 2. Marketing A commercial publication by a
company attempting to appear conversant and competitive on a
type of product a generation ahead of it's own.
- Windows for Workgroups
- n. A version of
MS Windows designed to be incompatible with previous LAN OS's,
including LAN Manager. Also, a failed initiative to force hardware
manufacturers to re-familiarize their programmers with device
driver code before asking them to write a new generation of device
drivers for Win95.
- Win32
- n. Microsoft's unifying API, promoted
to allow multiplatform development of applications. At the time
of announcement, there were three incompatible versions of Win32.
- Windows NT
- n. A version of MS Windows
that provides Task Switching and
no application memory protection layered over a
multitasking, protected OS.
- Win95
- n. 1. A version of
MS Windows that
integrates 16 bit DOS device drivers, 24 bit memory management and
32 bit applications on 64 bit processors with 128 bit video cards.
2. An operating environment that promised an end to memory
management problems, for which an entire range of
third-party memory management
programs is now available.
- Word Perfect for Windows
- n.
A large set of .EXE's, .DLL's, and fonts written by single-tasking,
single-user-oriented programmers for use on a
task-switching environment run on a
multi-user LAN.
Antonym: Productivity Application.
- The X Windowing System (X Windows)
- n. A graphical network protocol specification with
reference implementation maintained by MIT. X Windows was
thrust into the limelight when DEC and IBM sought to kill
Sun's postscript-based NeWs
(Network Extensible Windowing System)
before it became an industry standard like Sun's NFS did. The
Open System Foundation was formed and funded by Sun
competitors to write OSF/Motif, a higher-level programming
API and user interface (window manager) for X, now the predominate
standard. X applications can be run on an X client machine and
displayed on an X server (usually an X-Term or
RISC Workstation), allowing for truly
distributed client/server applications.
- Yellow Pages
- n. A system of network configuration
files developed by Sun Microsystems and AT&T, extending the
text-file setup concept of individual UNIX
computers to UNIX LANs. The name was changed to NIS
(Network Information System) because AT&T
faced trademark problems with foreign TelCo's when marketing
System V. NIS+, the latest version of YP, has largely
been superceded by DNS, except for the local network password
maintenance features.
- z3950
- n. A network protocol used by WAIS
(the Wide Area Information System,
freeware or COTS now marketed by AOL)
for distributed database text retrieval.
z3950 level one is specified for use by GILs, the
Government Information Locator Service,
while WAIS uses level two.
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