GLOSSARY OF TERMS AND ABBREVIATIONS
ADPCM. Adaptive differential pulse code modulation.
ASYNCHRONOUS. Pertaining to two or more processes that do not depend upon the occurrence of a specific event such as a common timing signal.
BPS. Bits per second. In serial transmission, the instantaneous bit speed with which a device or channel transmits a character.
CODEC. Pertaining to adapters that compress and decompress video files. The letters "CODEC" represent "compression/decompression"; in the past, they represented "coder/decoder."
COM. Communication port.
COMPRESSION. The process of eliminating gaps, empty fields, redundancies, and unnecessary data to shorten the length of records or blocks.
DAA. Data access arrangement.
DSP. Digital signal processor.
DMA. Direct memory access.
DSVD. Digital simultaneous voice over data.
DUPLEX. Pertaining to communication in which data can be sent and received at the same time. Synonymous with full duplex.
FAX. (1) Hard copy received from a facsimile machine. (T) Synonymous with telecopy. (2) To transmit an image, using a telephone system and facsimile machines. (T)
ISA. Industry standard architecture.
JPEG. Joint Photographic Experts Group.
MCI. Media control interface.
MIDI. Musical Instrument Digital Interface.
MIDI FILE. An audio file that has a MIDI format.
MIPS. Millions of instructions per second.
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