Glossary 107
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.
B | 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. |