Owner's manual

107

Glossary

5.375 x 8.375 ver 2.4.0

American National Standards Institute (ANSI) character set: The

set of characters available in Microsoft

Windows

operating

system (or other operating system). The character set includes

letters, numbers, symbols and foreign language characters.

American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII): A

set of 256 binary codes that represent the most commonly used

letters, numbers and symbols. See also binary.

animation: A technique of imparting motion to items, either

drawings or inert objects.

application: A computer program that you use to perform tasks of a

specific type. Applications include word processors, spreadsheets

and database management systems. See also program.

asynchronous: A type of data transmission in which information is

sent at variable time intervals. To indicate when a transmitted

character begins and ends, it is preceded by a start bit and

followed by an optional parity bit and one or two stop bits. See

also synchronous.

baud (baud rate): The speed at which communications devices

such as printers, terminals, and modems transmit information.

Information travels as a series of electronic signals. The baud rate

measures the rate of change in these signals. This is not

necessarily the same as bits per second, although the two are

related. It is named for Emil Baudot, a pioneer in printing

telegraphy. See also bits per second.

Bell Standard: A series of communication procedures for telephone

lines and other analog data transmission lines standardized by

AT&T (American Telephone & Telegraph).

bit: The basic unit of information used by the computer, a bit may

be either 1 or 0. While an individual bit cannot contain a

significant amount of information, by combining bits into larger

units, such as bytes (a group of eight connected bits), your

computer can deal with huge blocks of data. See also byte.