| * not in alphabetical order, to
find a term goto "FIND on this page in menu bar" |
| AAAI
American
Association
for Artifical Inteligence |
| Organization
formed in 1981 to further the work in AI |
| PAL
Programmable
array logic
|
| A
type of integrated
circuit which contains an array of logic elements or 'gates'
which can be programmed by the purchaser using a Pal
programmer |
| MIPS
Million Instructions
Per Second
|
| MIPS
refers to the average number of machine language instructions a
computer can perform or execute in one second. However, it can
be
shown that the same computer can execute two different loops of code to
estimate MIPS, and their execution times will differ significantly.
MIPS should therefore be used only as a very general
measure of
performance between different types of computre |
| PCB
Printed
circuit board
|
A
method of allowing
electronic components to be interconnected by a network of copper
conductors which are in a pattem that has been
pre-printed on
to
copper-clad insulating board.
|
| PCI
Peripheral component interconnect |
| Intel's
version of the local bus system. Peripherals such as hard
disk
drives, network connectors and video monitors are usually
controlled
by
circuit 'cards' that plug into the main computer circuit board via
connectors or 'expansion slots'. The connectors are attached to the set
of wires, or 'bus', that carries signals to and from the CPU. |
| BIOS
Basic
Input/Output System |
A set
oflow-Ievel routines in a computer's ROM that
application
programs (and operating systems) can use to read characters from the
keyboard, output characters to printers, and interact with the
hardware in other ways. Many plug-in adapters include their own BIOS
modules that work in conjunction with the BIOS on the system board.
|
| MTBF Mean Time Before Failure |
Is a
measure of the
average amount of time, usually given in hours, that a hardware
component
continues to operate without failure. For most manufacturers, it is the
number of failures that occur
during the factory test period divided into the total number of hours
under observation. |
| EIDE
Enhanced
Integrated Device
Electronics |
| An
enhanced
version of the IDE drive interface that expands the maximum disk size
from 504MB to 804GB, more than doubles the maximum data transfer rate,
and supports up to four drives per P |
| HPFS
High Performance File System |
| OS/2's
native file system. HPFS offers superior
performance
compared with the FAT file system, supports long filenames, and can
efficiently handle hard disks of virtually any size. |
| NRZ
Non-retum to zero |
| Information
in digital computers is represented by
the binary digits 1 and 0. When a computer wishes to
communicate with,
eg. a modem, it will send or receive the data in serial (one bit at a
time) form. NRZ
describes the method of communication where the data
line starts at logic 1 , changes state as the information is carried,
and finishes at logic 1 |
| Nanosecond |
| The
combining form "nano" is derived from the Greek word nanos
for dwarf
and is used to designate ten to the minus ninth power.
One billionth of a second is called a nanosecond, that's one
thousand-millionth of a second. Sometimes a nanosecond is
called a billisecond. The speed of logic and
memory chips is measured in nanoseconds. The RAM chips in your
computer are rated in nanoseconds. They may be 80 ns, 70 ns or 60 ns
chips. Electricity travels approximately one foot per
nanosecond. |
| Mainframe |
Large
computers are referred to as mainframes.
The mainframe is the piece of equipment on large computers that
contains the CPU. Mainframe computers have large
memory capacities, and
are used where large volumes of data,are stored and processed. The term
"mainframe" is really a holdover from the days when most
computer
systems occupied the space of several rooms. There really was a main
frame, and several secondary frames or large rack |
| ISA
Industry Standard Architecture |
| The
8- and 16-bit bus design featured in the IBM
Pc/At |
| IEEE
Institute
of Electrical and
Electronics
Engineering standards
committee |
| The
EPP specification transforms a
parallel port into an expansion bus that can handle up to 64 disk
drives, tape drives, CD-ROM drives, and other mass-storage devices. |
| ASIC
application-specific integrated
circuit |
| An
integrated-circuit
chip designed for a particular use rather than
general use.
Many video boards and modems use ASICs. |
| ATA
AT attachment |
| The
specification, formulated in the 1980s by a consortium of
hardware and software manufacturers, that defines the IDE
drive
interface. AT refers to the IBM pC AT personal computer and its bus
architecture. IDE drives are sometimes referred to as ATA
drives
or AT bus drives. The newer ATA-2 specification defines the EIDE
interface, which improves upon the IDE standard. See also IDE
and
EIDE |
EPP
Enhanced
Parallel Port
|
| A
parallel port that conforms to the EPP standard
developed by the IEEE |
| OEM
Original
equipment manufacturer |
| The manufacturer, rather than
the
distributer or retailer, of a component or piece of software. |
| EISA
Extended Industry Standard
Architecture |
| An
open 32-bit bus architecture
developed by Compaq and a consortium of computer vendors to
counter
the proprietary Micro Channel architecture proffered by IBM.
Unlike
the Micro Channel, an EISA bus is backward-compatible with 8- and
16-bit expansion cards designed for the ISA bus. Despite its 32-bit
design and other promising features (such as bus arbitration and
support for burst-mode data transfers), EISA never gained widespread
acceptance, in part because of the substantially higher cost required
to manufacture EISA buses and adapters. |
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