Every time you put in a couple of computer people together in a room you end up hearing all sorts of funny words, and you begin to wonder if they really should be out there on their own. Well next time you are in a room with some of these computer freaks, you can show them that you do understand their lingo, throw them words like: OCR software, data compression, and roll your eyes for effect, that will get them going, and very soon you will have them eating out of your hand. Anyway, these are just some of the words you may have been confused about, earlier, there are words you may not have read earlier, but they may come in handy nevertheless.

Accelerator board

This term can cover several different kinds of speed-up expansion boards. A graphics accelerator board is a video board with a special processor chip for handling graphics, so your PC's CPU can devote itself to other tasks. These days it well nigh impossible to buy a video board that's not "accelerated".

Access time

The time it takes to search, retrieve, and return data from computer media. Videotape takes minutes, videodisk takes a few seconds, CD-ROM under 350 milliseconds, hard disk 10-20 milliseconds, and memory microseconds.

Acquisition

The process of transferring data from analog to digital form; specifically video material. Also referred to as capturing.

Adapter

Some people use this term as a synonym for controller, an expansion board or plug that connects a drive, a monitor, a scanner, or some other peripheral to the PC and controls it.

Alpha-test

The first formal testing period for a software or multimedia product that tests correctness and general functionality. Followed by a beta testing.

Analog

Any physical system indexed, controlled, or represented by continuously variable physical quantities, typically electrically based.

Animation

A sequence of illustrations that give the illusion of motion. The two basic branches of animation are 2D and 3D animation.

Animator

An artist that produces animations, commonly on a computer using animation software.

Anti-aliasing

A process of blurring a jagged line to give the appearance of a smooth line.

Application

A program made up of computer instructions, which perform a specific task. When you call an application from the operating system, the application opens and appears to you on the screen, so that you can use it.

Aspect ratio

The ratio of the width to height of an image or screen generally expressed as a fraction. Consumer television has a 4:3 aspect ratio. Images will become distorted if forced into a different aspect ratio during enlargement, reduction, or transfers.

Audio

The medium of sound. In multimedia, this includes voice, music, sound effects, and ambient sound.

Audio compression

A way of reducing the size of a file that contains audio information. Audio compression often lowers sound quality.

Authoring tool

A tool that provides much of the framework for creating electronic books or presentations.

AVI

File format used by Microsoft for digital audio and video. The acronym stands for Audio Video Interleaved.

Bandwidth

The capacity of an analog or digital transmission or network. The amount of information that can be transferred in a given period of time by a given piece of hardware.

Benchmark

A speed test, for the CPU in your PC, using certain programs to push the limit under controlled conditions.

Beta-testing

A second and final testing period for a product usually done by actual users in real-world situations.

Binary

A system with only two possible states such as on or off, 1 or 0, high or low.

BIOS

The low level operating instructions for your computer stored in a read only memory chip on the motherboard. The acronym stands for basic input/output system.

Bit depth

The number of bits used to represent black and white, grayscale or color values. Common bit depths are 1,4,8, and 24.

Bitmap

Images or fonts that are described as pixels. The image file is written as a pixel formation, hence any change in the original can make the changed image look jagged. A bitmap can contain grayscale tones or colors but is commonly used to describe black-and-white images.

Bug

A problem or incompatibility in hardware or software.

Byte

A measure of data equal to eight bits.

CD-Audio

Commonly called a CD. A format for storing audio music in digital form that is used for the CDs found in music stores. All audio compact disks will play in any audio compact disk player.

CD player

The drive that spins and reads a compact disc, whether it's an audio CD player in your stereo or a CD-ROM drive in your PC.

CD-ROM

A laser-readable disc that stores many hundreds (650) of megabytes of digital data. The data can be applications, audio-video files, drivers, or text files. The ROM part is for read-only memory. This is a bit misleading; it only means that your PC cannot write to the disc. No memory is involved.

CD-ROM drive

The drive that spins and reads a CD-ROM disc in your PC.

Chip

A complex combination of transistors and electronic circuitry that's integrated and etched onto a silicon die. IC chips make computers possible. In the form of simple memory chips they handle data storage; as CPUs or microprocessors, they execute high-level number crunching.

Clock speed

The frequency at which a CPU, a motherboard, or an expansion board steps through its basic operations. Usually measured in megahertz, or millions of cycles per second. For example, a CPU that marches at 150 million steps per second is said to have a 150-MHz clock speed.

CMOS

The battery-backed chip in your PC that's used to store basic system information, such as hard disk type and installed memory. The acronym stands for Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor.

Codec

Any scheme for compressing audio or video information for storage and then decompressing it for use. The acronym stands for compression/decompression.

Composite video

A complete video signal used in transmission of conventional television and consumer camcorders rather than professional component color systems.

Composition

A method of accumulating separately rendered video, graphics, animations, backgrounds, and sounds into a single final track.

Compression

This term may refer to file compression, as used by archiving utilities such as PKZIP, or to disk compression, as used by utilities such as Stacker. But in a multimedia context, compression always refers to a scheme for compressing audio or video information for storage.

Configuration

This term may refer to customizing software or to setting up hardware to work a certain way. You usually use a built-in setup utility to configure your PC for type and size of hard disk, and for installed memory. You use software or had to move jumpers before the plug and play days to configure expansion boards and other hardware. You configure software by using setup files, initialization files, and .INI files. Most of these luckily you don't have to do any more, as most programs add their comments to the files mentioned above.

Content

The information, media, or story used in a multimedia product to educate, entertain, communicate, or in any way affect an audience.

Continuous tone

A photographic image that contains gradient tones from black to white.

Controller

An expansion board, plug, or other electronic device that control the operations of a drive, a monitor, or some other peripheral attached to your PC.

Copyright

The right of ownership to an original work of art. Automatically granted to the creator but transferable to another party by law or by contractual agreements.

CPU

The chip that does most of the serious computing in your PC. Different CPUs have names, 386, 486, 586, 686 and Pentium - and a computer takes its name from the CPU that is mounted on its motherboard. A CPU is also known as a microprocessor. The acronym stands for central processing unit.

Crop

A process used in editing images and video that removes or obscures portion of the frame.

Cross-platform

A strategy or method to develop media or software to run on more than one multimedia player or computer.

CRT

The picture tube in the TV, and most PCs. The acronym stands for cathode ray tube.

Cut

Editing term that refers to a piece of sound, video, or film media that is abruptly followed by another piece of media. When experienced the media seems to jump.

CyberArt

General term referring to computer art of the 1990's derived from cybernetics, which is the study of man machine interfaces.

DAT

Digital audio tape. A delivery medium used for high definition sound recording and computer file backup. DAT has better time synchronizing quality than analog tape.

Data transfer rate

Measures how much information can be transferred in a given period of time by a given piece of hardware. In a multimedia context, this term usually refers to how quickly data can move off the CD-ROM (or hard disk) and into memory.

Default

How things will happen unless you decide to change them. You can usually change any default. For example on your home PC when using Windows 95 every file will be saved in 'My Documents' directory unless you specify some other directory.

Desktop publishing

Use of a computer system that provides the ability to produce publication-quality documents.

Device driver'

All peripheral devices (modems, CD-ROM drives, and printers) require a special piece of software so they can communicate with the computer. This hardware specific software is called a device driver, and the system file in the start generally loads it.

Digital

The representation of a signal by a set of numeric values. Commonly represented on a computer in a binary form.

Digital sound processor

A chip that is specialized for working with digital sound. It can convert analog sound waves into digital form and then perform various operations on the data.

Digitizers

Any multimedia device that records media to a computer disk in digital form. There are sound, video, and image digitizers.

Directory

If you visualize your hard disk as a country, you might think of its various directories as states: smaller subdivisions of a bigger place. To confuse matters further, directories can have subdirectories nested under them - which you might think of as cities. You can nest many levels of directories and subdirectories. In reality, of course, a directory is really just a naming convention, a convenient way for the operating system to organize your files - like a file folder in a file cabinet.

Disk

A plate of optical or magnetic material used to store data in a digital form.

Disk cache

Reading and writing data to and from the hard disk is one of the slowest things that your computer does. Reading and writing to and from memory is one of the fastest. Disk caching software (or hardware) takes advantage of the latter fact to overcome the former - and delivers a significant performance speed up by storing frequently accessed data in a portion of RAM.

Disk defragmenter

In normal operation, the operating system scatters pieces of files all across the surface of the hard disk. It can usually reassemble those fragments the next time you need the file, but the more fragments there are, the longer reassembly takes. In extreme cases the operating system could crash. Disk defragmentation reassembles all the fragments and saves the file in one continuous piece.

Dissolve

Media editing term that refers to overlapping two pieces of media to make a transition from one to the other. A dissolve is usually the fading out of one overlaid on the fading up of the other.

Display

This word refers to the CRT monitor (or LCD panel on a notebook computer) that shows you pretty pictures. It can also refer to the CRT plus the video board that sends the pretty pictures. As a verb, it refers to the PCs ability to put an image on the screen.

DMA

A way by which a peripheral device can talk to system memory without bothering the CPU. Your PC has eight DMA channels; every peripheral that uses DMA needs to have a different channel.

Dpi

Dots per inch. This term defines resolution for printers, monitors, scanners, and any other peripheral device that uses dots. The more dots per inch, the better the image will look.

Drawing tools

Computer applications that let a user create images using combinations of rectangles, ovals, lines, and other geometric shapes.

Drive

A computer disk or CD-ROM disc device that accepts, reads, and in most cases, writes data to a disc or diskette. Can refer to a hard drive, floppy drive, CD-ROM drive, cartridge drive, or other.

DVI

Digital Video Interactive. A chip set, developed and marketed by Intel, that provides real-time decompression full-motion video from a hard disk or CD-ROM.

E-mail

Electronic mail. The process of sending and receiving messages with computers. Messages may be sent and stored for later retrieval.

End-user

The final user of a product. If the general people shopping in the mall are or will use an information kiosk, then they are the end-users.

Enhanced IDE

The latest iteration of the IDE standard enables you to install up to four IDE disk drives and delivers slightly faster performance than conventional IDE.

Ethernet

A widely used protocol of networking high-speed transmission cables and software used to transfer data between computers.

Fade-in

A gradual transition from one static media to a moving scene. In video, fade-in from black is most common. In audio, fade in from silence or ambient sound.

Fade-out

A gradual transition from one media to a static one.

FAT

The filing system Windows 95 uses to keep track of which clusters on your hard (or floppy) disk are in use. The acronym stands for file allocation table.

File server

Remote and common disk storage connected to computers by a network that manages the sharing of common data and applications.

Flatbed scanner

A device that works in a manner similar to a photocopy machine with original art positioned face down on a glass plate. Instead of replicating the image, the image is scanned or placed into a digital form. The scanner is commonly controlled through software running on a computer.

Font

A complete set of characters in one design, sizes, and style. In traditional typography usage, a font may be restricted to a particular size and style or may comprise multiple sizes and styles of a type face design.

Fps

Acronym for frames per second. Movies use 24 fps, most TVs use 30 fps. The higher the frame rate, the smoother the movement and the more realistic the video.

Frame

A single unit of media data. A frame is a measure of the fields that make up 1/30^th of a second.

Frequency

The number of times a sound wave oscillates measured in Hertz or cycles per second.

Full-motion video

Originally 30 fps, but the term is now widely misused to refer to any moving image on a PC, no matter how small or how jerky.

Gigabyte (GB)

A gigabyte is 1,024 megabytes or 1,073,737,728 bytes.

Graphics controller

Sometimes this term refers to the video adapter, sometimes to the chip on the video board that handles image processing.

GroupWare

Software that allows several people working on the same tasks to better interact and work together.

Hard disk

Currently the most common data storage device in most PCs, a hard disk may store upto 10 GB of data on one or more metal platters coated with magnetic medium.

Hard disk interface

A loosely used term that may refer to the on-board electronics that tell a hard disk what to do, the expansion board controller that connects it to the PC, or the particular flavor of adapter it uses. The three most popular hard disk interfaces currently in use are IDE, Enhanced IDE, and SCSI.

Hertz (Hz)

A unit used to measure frequency, equal to one cycle per second. That is 1,000 cycles per second.

Hypermedia

An organizational structure for presenting information where text, graphics, and other media are associated in a dynamic and navigable form.

Icon

A graphic or pictographic symbol used to represent an abstract or concrete object or process.

IDE

Currently the most popular hard disk interface. The acronym stands for Integrated Drive Electronics.

Interactive

Software that responds quickly to certain choices and commands a user makes.

Interface

At one time this word was mainly used to describe a contact plane where two rock faces came together. In computer-speak it can refer to a data connector or the specification defining the way data will be passed through that connector (for instance, SCSI interface), or the way the user interacts with a program or computer.

Interface design

Designing the interaction and visual display of content and elements for electronic products with an eye towards ease of use.

Interleaving

The practice of sector-by-sector alternation between data types within files on a CD-ROM disc. Interleaving permits different types of data to be routed to different hardware or software as a file is playing.

Internet

A worldwide network of networks, computers that you can access via modem.

ISDN

Integrated Services Digital Network. A digital network architecture that allows for simultaneous digital voice and data transmission currently being installed by telephone carriers worldwide.

Jack

A place to plug in a wire or cable on a PC; a slightly less technical synonym for socket or I/O port.

Joystick

A game-control input device, the joystick usually includes a "directional controller" to move the cursor around the screen.

JPEG

Joint Photographers Experts Group. A set of protocols for compressing and decompressing still digital images. It can be implemented in either software or hardware.

Kilobyte

A kilobyte equals 1024 bytes.

Kilohertz

A kilohertz equals 1000 Hz, or 1,000 cycles per second.

Local bus

A set of unique expansion slots that enable special expansion boards, particularly video boards and drive controllers, to run at the same speed as the CPU, as opposed to the slower speed that most expansion slots used.

Main memory

The memory chips installed in your PC, where computing takes place. Also called system memory, memory, and RAM.

Megabyte

A megabyte equals 1.024 kilobytes, or 1,048,576 bytes.

Megahertz (MHz)

A megahertz equals 1 million Hz, or 1,000,000 cycles per second.

Memory address

A location in system memory where a numerical value can be stored, and where it will remain until no longer needed. Badly behaved applications overwrite the values in certain memory addresses before another application is done with them, which usually causes the system to crash.

Memory buffer

A loosely used term that generally refers to a block of memory dedicated to caching data during disk reads from hard disks and CD-ROM drives. The term may refer to either system memory, or to special fast RAM.

Memory cache

A small amount of very fast RAM that is dedicated to helping the CPU operate more efficiently. This cache may be built into the CPU, or it may be an external memory cache that's built onto the motherboard.

MIDI

MIDI is a standard by which musicians can send a digital copy of their music to a computer, and save it in a file called a MIDI file. MIDI files can be played back through a MIDI synthesizer, which is often built into a MIDI instrument but comes as part of most soundboards, too. The acronym stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface.

MIDI file

A digital record of music using the MIDI formats. Most soundboards can play back MIDI sound files, which are becoming increasingly common in multimedia applications.

MIDI synthesizer

An electronic device that converts MIDI information into analog sound. A MIDI synthesizer is supposedly capable of approximating the sounds of 128 different instruments. It may be a stand-alone unit, or it may be build into a MIDI instrument or soundboard.

Modem

A peripheral device that enables your PC to send and receive digital data over a phone line. The acronym is for modulator/demodulator.

Monitor

The device that displays the text and images produced by your computer's video board. May be color or monochrome. Sometimes referred to as a VDT, short for video display terminal.

Morphing

A transition by shape of one scene or object into another.

Motherboard

The main circuit board in your PC. It may or may not hold memory chips or the CPU, but it usually includes expansion slots.

Motion video

Moving pictures that show on your PC. Most people use the term to refer to live action, TV-style moving pictures (as opposed to animation, or drawings that move), but this distinction is extremely fuzzy.

MPEG

A high-quality video compression/decompression standard that requires special hardware in the form of an MPEG board or an MPEG microprocessor. MPEG loses less data than most compression schemes, so it can produce bigger, prettier pictures and more frames per second. The acronym stands for Motion Picture Experts Group.

Multimedia

A very general term that refers to any of the following: a sound movie, or video that can be displayed on your computer, the simultaneous display of audio and video information on a computer, and any computer software that requires a sound board and a CD-ROM drive to run properly.

Navigation

Controls that allow a user to move around a product as well as elements that provide cues.

Network

A collection of connected computers that share resources and data.

Online

Refers to telecommunication over a phone line, usually via a modem. Also loosely used to mean connected in any way to a computer or computer network.

Operating system

The low-level software that tells your computer how to perform basic tasks like reading from and writing to disk, putting images on the monitor, moving data from the CD-ROM to the sound board, and so on.

OCR

Optical Character Recognition. A process of converting scanned images of text into digitally based character information.

Peripheral

Any hardware device that you can add to a computer: a disk drive, a modem, a mouse, a printer, etc.

Pixel

The tiny dots of glowing phosphor that combine to paint a picture on your monitor (or TV screen). Technically, each pixel on a color monitor is made up of at least three subpixels, one for each primary color. The term is so widely used that most people don't know that it was originally an acronym for picture element.

Plug-and-play

Aside from its general usage, which refers to something that is easy to install, this term points to the standard designed by Microsoft, Intel, and several other big computer companies. The standard allows the user to virtually automatically install peripherals, such as soundboards, CD-ROM drives, and so on.

Protocol

A set of rules that govern the way information is exchanged between processes or machines.

RAM

Memory; memory chips; the part of your computer where data and instructions are stored, referenced, and overwritten by the CPU. Any data stored in RAM will disappear when the power goes off, unless you save it to disk first. Your PC can have anywhere from 640K to 128MB of RAM. The acronym stands for random access memory.

Read-only

A file that cannot be written-to, edited or deleted. You can use the various utility programs around to make a file read-only. This term is also the first two-thirds of the popular acronym ROM, which stands for read-only memory. ROM is often used in connection with CD-ROM discs and ROM BIOS (which is a set of computer instructions that is stored on the BIOS chip, and cannot be changed.

Read.me file

A file containing the latest information on installing and troubleshooting an application an application. The Read.me file is usually installed automatically in the same directory as the application to which it applies. You can use your word processor to read it.

Read/write head

Disk drives and tape drives use read/write heads to record data on the magnetic media and read it back later.

Reboot

If your computer crashes, or you make changes in your startup files and want to put the changes into effect, you need to restart your PC. That's called rebooting. You can do a cold boot by turning the power off and back on, or by pressing the reset button, or you can do a warm boot by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Delete.

Resolution

The granularity of a display or image typically indicated by a dots per inch measurement. Allowing the dot to have a wider color range can increase apparent resolution.

ROM

Read Only Memory. A type of memory, which stores key data, used by a computer. It can only be read and is not erased when the power is turned off.

Root directory

The highest or top directory on your hard disk or floppy disk.

Sampling

The process by which a computer turns an analog sound wave into digital data. The computer takes samples or measurements of the sound wave's amplitude many times per second. The more frequently it takes a sample (the frequency is the sampling rate) the more accurately it can model the original sound.

Scanner

A peripheral device that scans a printed page and converts the text and images it finds there into a digital graphics file. It may also convert text into a text file with OCR (optical character recognition) software.

Screen saver

A utility that notices when there's no keyboard activity and sends a series of changing images to the monitor screen. It is commonly believed that an unchanging screen image will burn itself in to a monitor screen. Although burn-in is extremely rare, especially with color monitors, screen savers continue to be big sellers, probably because they are fun.

Script

In multimedia, a script can mean a storyboard, computer commands written in a scripting language, or exact speech and action for production of audio, video, or film.

SCSI

One of the several popular interfaces for connecting hard disks, CD-ROM drives, and other peripheral devices to computers. SCSI (which is pronounced scuzzy) has one big advantage over the other systems: you can chain as many as seven devices to one SCSI adapter. The acronym stands for Small Computer System Interface.

Sector

The magnetic surface of your hard disk is divided and subdivided several different ways. You've got your platters, your tracks, your clusters (also known as allocation units), and your sectors. Sectors are the smallest basic units of disk storage and usually hold 512 bytes. Groups of sectors are known as clusters, or allocation units.

SIMM

The standard memory chip that goes into your computer. SIMMs come in different sizes, flavors, and pin-outs. The acronym stands for Single In-line memory module.

Simulation

Use of computer generated multimedia to create the illusion of a real process or place.

Sound board

A hardware device that slides into an expansion slot on your motherboard and turns digital audio data into analog sound. It processes digital inputs that need processing, passes along the ones that don't, mixes all the inputs, and outputs them as composite analog signal that can be played back over headphones and speakers, or sent through a stereo system.

Sound recorder

A software utility that records analog audio in the form of digital .WAV files

Storyboard

An illustrated scene by scene plan portraying the story behind a multimedia concept. Each scene is typically filled with a detailed sketch over a block of narration. Software industry is waking up to the need for sophisticated storyboard software.

Super VGA

A term referring to any video mode with resolution and number of colors that is higher than standard VGA (640 x 480 pixels at 16 colors).

Synthesizer

An electronic device that produces musical sounds. It can be the cheap FM synthesizer built into the soundboard, or a multi-thousand dollar unit built into a professional electronic keyboard.

Tablet

An electronic pad with a stylus used for drawing. Often used instead of a mouse for illustration control.

Thumbnail

A small representation of an image or frame representing a full-motion sequence in a computer filing system.

TIFF

Tag Image File Format. The file type designation for image files. TIFF files can support various image resolutions and color scales including monochrome, grayscale, and 8-bit or 24-bit color.

Touchscreen

A monitor that acts as an input device by recognizing a user's touch.

Transfer rate

Measure of computer machinery or networks of the speed at which data can be transformed. CD-ROMs transfer between 150-300 kilobits per second.

Transition

A movement from one screen to another, often done using cuts, wipes, dissolves, or other video effects.

True color

A term used to indicate a device or software application, which can accommodate 24-bits of color information or over 16 million different color values.

VGA

Standard screen resolution, 640 x 480 at 16 colors. The acronym stands for Video Graphics Array.

Video Adapter

The expansion board that creates the video images and sends it to the monitor, by telling the CRT which pixels to light up in which colors. Sometimes a chip on the motherboard performs this task.

Video capture board

An expansion board that converts an analog signal from a video camera or a VCR into a digital signal your computer can store as a disk file.

Video compression

A way of reducing the size of a file that contains video information. Compression often lowers image quality.

Virtual reality

Simulated pictures and sounds that surround and react to a viewer's actions and perceptions.

Voice recognition

Your PC's ability to recognize and respond to spoken commands, and even to spoken text. Voice recognition software is still fairly primitive.

Wallpaper

Wallpaper is a bit-mapped graphics file that Windows reads and displays as the background for your on-screen desktop. It may be a decorative design or a photographic image.

Wavetable

A new sound board technology. A Wavetable stores digital samples of real instruments so MIDI playback sounds great. This technique replaces the older FM synthesizer that soundboards used to use for emulating musical sounds.

Wireframe

A computer animation technique of modeling a three dimensional object with a line segment prior to rendering it.

Windows

Microsoft Windows is a popular computing "environment". Windows primary appeal is that it enables you to start and control applications by using a mouse to point and click on icons and menus. Another big advantage is that most of new applications are designed for Windows, which also means that you can't run them until you load Windows first. In some ways Windows makes multimedia easier to use.

Zooming

Special transition or picture effect that brings something closer in view or further away by moving the perspective.