ABC Fun Monday

Running late again for Fun Monday. I'm preparing for my out of town trip will be gone starting today until Saturday. I gonna miss you Mariposa and of course all of you guys and gals out there. I'm bringing my laptop and hope I can get online while I'm away. ;-)

This weeks Fun Monday host wanted us to post about the ABC's of something. For my ABC's, I was thinking of something else but my adviser (a.k.a. Mariposa) told me to post something related to what I do.

Here it goes. The ABC's of I.T.

ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange (read as "askee"). It is the universal standard representing numerical codes computers use such as all upper and lower-case letters, numbers, punctuation and control codes. Without this standard, each computer would have used a different way of representing letters and numbers, causing major chaos for computer programmers and computer systems
Byte is a sequence of 8 bits (1's & 0's) which represents a character of an alphanumeric data processed as a single unit of information. Yeah is sounds the same as "bite" but its a totally different thing. LOL
COBOL (COmmon Business Oriented Language) is the programming language we're using at the office for our IBM iSeries (a.k.a. AS/400) servers which is running our Business Permit Licensing Software and Real Property Tax Systems.
DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) is the medium for transferring data over regular phone lines and can be used to connect to the Internet. However, unlike cable modems, a DSL circuit is much faster than a regular phone connection, even though the wires it uses are copper like a typical phone line
Ethernet is a family of frame-based computer networking technologies for LANS (local area networks).
Fibre Channel is a technology for transmitting data between computer devices at data rates of up to 4 Gbps (and 10 Gbps in the near future). It is especially suited for connecting computer servers to shared storage devices and for interconnecting storage controllers and drives.
Google is now my most widely used internet search engine. Mariposa and I have this common line if ever we need to find something on the net. "Google is a friend" :-)
HTTP (Hypertext Terminal Protocol) is a communication protocol commonly used in Intranet and World Wide Web. HTTP are identified using URLs (see below!)
Internet is short for International Network and is the medium why we can interconnect and interchange information around the world.
Java is an example of a programming language.
Kilobyte is a unit of information or computer storage equal to either 1,000 bytes or 1,024 bytes (210), depending on context. It can be abbreviated a number of ways: kB, K and Kbyte.
Language is not just limited to humans...computers has language too!
Memory is where you store information.
Nanotech is making our existing processors pack in more transistors over the same area of silicon material. How? Imagine arranging molecules to form transistors at that level.
OS or Operating System is the most important program that runs on a computer and manages its resources, and provides programmers with an interface used to access those resources. It processes system data and user input, and responds by allocating and managing tasks and internal system resources as a service to users and programs of the system. The OS performs basic tasks such as controlling and allocating memory, prioritizing system requests, controlling input and output devices, facilitating computer networking and managing files.
Protocol is an agreed set of rules for the communication of information between two or more devices, HTTP is an example of a protocol.
QWERTY is a standard (Latin alphabet-based) keyboard. Why? checkout your keyboard starting from Q in the upper-left part of the keyboard spelling out Q-W-E-R-T-Y. You could call it QWERTYUIOP keyboard, but QWERTY is a lot easier to say. If you're wondering why the keyboard is arranged this way it's because it was to reduce the jamming of type bars in typewriters as they moved to strike the paper.
RAM or Random Access Memory, random because it allows a computer to access any part of the memory directly.
Software is a collection of computer programs, procedures and documentation that perform some tasks on a computer system. It also covers application software such as word processors which perform productive tasks for users, system software such as operating systems, which interface with hardware to provide the necessary services for application software, and middleware which controls and co-ordinates distributed systems.
Terabyte is a unit storage. The value of a terabyte is based upon a decimal radix (base 10) and is defined as one trillion (short scale) bytes, or 1000 gigabytes.
URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator. That is we locate each other's blog!
VB means Visual Basic and is also a programming language!
WWW means World Wide Web but depending on your connection, it can also mean world wide wait...LOL
X86 is the generic name for Intel processors released after the original 8086 processor. These include the 286, 386, 486, and 586 processors. As you can see, the "x" in x86 stands for a range of possible numbers. Technically, x86 is short for 80x86 since the full names of the processors are actually 80286, 80386, 80486, and 80586. The "80" is typically truncated to avoid redundancy.
Yahoo is where I made my first internet e-mail account. This was my most widely used search engine before google came. ;-)
Zip is a lossless data compression and archival file format.

Now, check our lovely HOST for more fun ABC...mine was quite boring I know! LOL