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Common Terms

The terminology sub-team is submitting two commonly-used information technology terms every week to the all-staff list server, which will be compiled here for your convenience.

Bandwidth

How much "stuff" you can send through a connection (usually measured in "bits-per-second"). A full page of English text is about 16,000 bits. A fast modem can move about 15,000 bits in one second. A full-motion full screen video would require roughly 10,000,000 bits-per-second, depending on compression.

BIT

(BINary DigIT) -- a single digit number in base-2, in other words, either a 1 or a zero. The smallest unit of computerized data.

BPS

(Bits-Per-Second) -- a measurement of how fast data is moved from one place to another. A "28.8 modem" can move 28,000 bits per second.

Byte

a set of bits that usually represent a single character.

Client

A software package that is used to contact and obtain data from a server software program on another computer, often across a great distance. Each client program is designed to work with one or more specific kinds of server programs, and each server requires a specific kind of client.

Digitization

The process of taking pre-existing continuous analog electronic signals (e.g. a song on a cassette or a movie on a video, etc.) and converting it into a digital signal that a computer can manipulate.

Download

To copy a file from a host system to your hard drive / floppy / or another host system.

Ethernet

A very common method of networking computers in a LAN. Ethernet will handle 10,000,000 bits-per-second and can be used with almost any kind of computer.

FAQ

(Frequently Asked Questions) -- FAQs are documents that list and answer the most common questions on a particular subject. There are hundreds of FAQs on subjects as diverse as Pet Grooming and Cryptography. FAQs are usually written by people who are tired of answering the same question over and over.

Finger

A program that displays information about a particular user, or all users, logged on the local system or on a remote system. It typically shows full name, last login time, idle time, terminal line, and terminal location (where applicable). It may also display plan and project files left by the user.

FTP

(File Transfer Protocol) -- A very common method of moving files between two Internet sites. FTP is a special way to log-in to another Internet site for the purposes of retrieving and/or sending files. There are many Internet sites that have established publicly accessible repositories of material that can be obtained using FTP, by logging in using the account name "anonymous", thus these sites are called "anonymous ftp servers".

Gateway

The original Internet term for what is now called router or more precisely, IP router. In modern usage, the terms "gateway" and "application gateway" refer to systems which do translation from some native format to another. Examples include X.400 to/from RFC 822 electronic mail gateways.

Grayscale

Refers to a series of gray tones ranging from white to pure black. The more shades or levels of gray, the more accurately an image will look like a full-tones black-and-white photograph. Most scanners will scan from 16 to 256 gray tones. A grayscale image file is typically one-third the size of a color one.

Internet

(Upper case I) -- The vast collection of inter-connected networks that all use the TCP/IP protocols (system for transferring information over a computer network) and that evolved from the ARPANet (precursor to the Internet) of the late 60's and early 70's. The Internet now connects roughly to 70,000 independant networks into a vast global internet.

internet

(Lower case i) -- Any time you connect 2 or more networks together, you have an internet - as in inter-national or inter-state.

Initialize

The process of setting all values on a hard disk, removable media, or floppy disk to zero; in other words, erasing all of the data that's currently there.

ISP

(Internet Service Provider or simply "Provider") -- a company that "provides" Internet and Web access to users, usually for a monthly fee; for example: America Online, Compuserve, and AT&T.

Kilobyte

a thousand bytes. Actually, usually 1024 (2^10) (2 to the 10th power) bytes.

LAN

(Local Area Network) -- a computer network limited to the immediate area, usually the same building or floor of a building.

Megabyte

a million bytes. A thousand kilobytes.

Network

Any time you connect 2 or more computers together so that they can share resources, you have a computer network. Connect 2 or more networks together and you have an internet.

PC

The generic term for Personal Computer or Microcomputer. IBM called its first personal computer the PC, but this term has fallen into general use to identify any computer that meets the specifications originally set by IBM.

Port

Three meanings: first and most generally, a place where information goes into or out of a computer, or both, e.g. the "serial port" on a personal computer is where a modem would be connected.

On the internet, "port" often refers to a number that is part of a URL, appearing after a colon (:) right after the domain name. Every service on an internet server "listens" on a particular port number on that server. Most services have standard port numbers, e.g. Web servers normally listen on port 80. Services can also listen on non-standard ports and must be specified in the URL, e.g. gopher://peg.cwis.uci.edu:7000/

Finally, "port" also refers to translating a piece of software to bring it from one type of computer system to another, e.g. to translate a Windows program so that it will run on a Macintosh.

Scanning

The process of taking a physical object and turning it into a digital image that can be displayed and manipulated by a computer. When you scan a photograph, for example, you are creating in the computer an electronic copy of that photo. Similarly, if you take a picture with a digital camera, you are in effect scanning the landscape (or whatever) and copying that into the camera's memory.

Search Engine

(on the Web) -- Sites that aid users in finding Web pages relating to chosen topics; for example: Yahoo, Lycos, and Infoseek. (general) -- Programs on the Internet that allow users to search through massive databases of information.

Server

A computer, or software package, that provides a specific kind of service to client software running on other computers. The term can refer to a particular piece of software, such as a WWW server, or to the machine on which the software is running, e.g. "our mail server is down today, that's why e-mail isn't getting out". A single server machine could have serveral different server software packages running on it, thus providing many different servers to clients on the network.

Terminal

A device that allows you to send commands to a computer somewhere else. At a minimum, this usually means a keyboard and a display screen and some simple circuitry. Usually you will use terminal software in a personal computer - the software pretends to be ("emulates") a physical terminal and allows you to type commands to a computer somewhere else.

Upload

To copy a file from your hard drive / floppy / or host system to another host system.

URL

(Uniform Resource Locator) -- The standard way to give the address of any resource on the Internet that is part of the World Wide Web (WWW). A URL looks like this:

http://www.matisse.net/seminars.html
or gopher://gopher.tc.umn.edu
or telnet://well.sf.ca.us
or news:new.newusers.questions
etc.....

Usenet

Usenet is the formal name, and Netnews a common informal name, for a distributed computer information service that many hosts on the Internet make use of. Usenet is a bit like a computer bulletin board with discussion groups by topic; however, it is one to four orders of magnitude larger, containing more than 8000 "newsgroups" on technical, scientific, political and social subjects. You can read news from your machine using a newsreader program. You can also read news with Netscape's built-in newsreader.

WAN

(Wide Area Network) -- any internet or network that covers an area larger than a single building or campus.

WWW

(World Wide Web, or "The Web") -- Two meanings; first, loosely used: The whole constellation of resources that can be accessed using Gopher, FTP, HTTP, telnet, Usenet, WAIS or some other tools. Second, the universe of hypertext servers (HTTP servers) which are the servers that allow text, graphics, sound files, etc. to be mixed together. This hypermedia network was originated by CERN, a high-energy physics laboratory in Switzerland.

http://www.inforamp.net/~england/help/glossary.html
http://nothing.ucsd.edu/faq/common-terms.html
http://www.csinet.net/glossary/glossary.htm
http://urislib.library.cornell.edu/glossary.html
http://www.word-library.com/iii2.html
http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Terms.html
http://www.teleport.com/~tbchad/terms.html
http://www.lgc.peachnet.edu/infotech/glossary.htm

gopher://nic.merit.edu:7043/0/introducing.the.internet/users.glossary
http://locke.ccil.org/jargon/
http://www.ora.com/reference/dictionary

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