Made By Humans E Series

104

LifeBook E Series – Section Eight

Disk

A spinning platter of magnetic data storage media. If the

platter is very stiff it is a hard drive, if it is highly ﬂexible

it is a ﬂoppy disk, if it is a ﬂoppy disk in a hard housing

with a shutter it is commonly called a diskette.

Disk Drive

The hardware which spins the disk and has the heads

and control circuitry for reading and writing the data

on the disk.

Diskette

A ﬂoppy disk in a hard housing with a shutter.

DMA

Direct Memory Access. Special circuitry for memory

to memory transfers of data which do not require

CPU action.

DMI

Desktop Management Interface. A standard that

provides PC management applications with a common

method of locally or remotely querying and conﬁguring

PC computer systems, hardware and software compo-

nents, and peripherals.

DOS

Disk Operating System (MS-DOS is a Microsoft Disk

Operating System).

Driver

A computer program which converts application and

operating system commands to external devices into the

exact form required by a speciﬁc brand and model of

device in order to produce the desired results from that

particular equipment.

ECP

Extended Capability Port. A set of standards for high

speed data communication and interconnection

between electronic devices.

ESD

Electro-Static Discharge. The sudden discharge of elec-

tricity from a static charge which has built-up slowly.

Example: the shock you get from a doorknob on a dry day

or the sparks you get from brushing hair on a dry day.

Extended Memory

All memory more than the 640KB recognized by

MS-DOS as system memory.

FCC

Federal Communication Commission.

Floppy Disk

A spinning platter of magnetic data storage media which

is highly ﬂexible.

Gigabyte.

Hard drive

A spinning platter of magnetic data storage media where

the platter is very stiff.

Hexadecimal

A decimal notation for the value of a 4 bit binary

number. (0-9, A, B, C, D, E, F) Example: 2F in hexa-

decimal = 00101111 in binary = 47 in decimal.

I/O

Input/Output. Data entering and leaving your notebook

in electronic form.

I/O Port

The connector and associated control circuits for data

entering and leaving your notebook in electronic form.

IDE

Intelligent Drive Electronics. A type of control interface

for a hard drive which is inside the hard drive unit.

Infrared

Light just beyond the red portion of the visible light

spectrum which is invisible to humans.

An abbreviation for infrared.

IrDA

Infrared Data Association. An organization which

produces standards for communication using infrared

as the carrier.

IRQ

Interrupt Request. An acronym for the hardware signal

to the CPU that an external event has occurred which

needs to be processed.

Kilobyte.