Tyan Computer S5372-LC warranty Mirroring see RAID

IDE (Integrated Device/Drive Electronics): a simple, self-contained HDD interface. It can handle drives up to 8.4 GB in size. Almost all IDEs sold now are in fact Enhanced IDEs (EIDEs), with maximum capacity determined by the hardware controller.

IDE INT (IDE Interrupt): a hardware interrupt signal that goes to the IDE.

I/O (Input/Output): the connection between your computer and another piece of hardware (mouse, keyboard, etc.)

Initial Program Load (IPL): a feature built into BBS-compliant devices, describing those devices as capable of loading and executing an OS, as well as being able to provide control back to the BIOS if the loading attempt fails.

IPL: see Initial Program Load.

IRQ (Interrupt Request): an electronic request that runs from a hardware device to the CPU. The interrupt controller assigns priorities to incoming requests and delivers them to the CPU. It is important that there is only one device hooked up to each IRQ line; doubling up devices on IRQ lines can lock up your system. Plug-n- Play operating systems can take care of these details for you.

ISA (Industry Standard Architecture): a slower 8- or 16-bit bus (data pathway).

Latency: the amount of time that one part of a system spends waiting for another part to catch up. This is most common when the system sends data out to a peripheral device, and it waiting for the peripheral to send some data back (peripherals tend to be slower than onboard system components).

Mirroring: see RAID.

NVRAM: ROM and EEPROM are both examples of Non-Volatile RAM, memory that holds its data without power. DRAM, in contrast, is volatile.

OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers): Compaq or IBM package other companies’ motherboards and hardware inside their case and sell them.

Parallel port: transmits the bits of a byte on eight different wires at the same time (that is, in parallel form, eight bits at the same time).

PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect): a 32 or 64-bit local bus (data pathway) which is faster than the ISA bus. Local buses are those which operate within a single system (as opposed to a network bus, which connects multiple systems).

PCI PIO (PCI Programmable Input/Output) modes: the data transfer modes used by IDE drives. These modes use the CPU for data transfer (in contrast, DMA channels do not). PCI refers to the type of bus used by these modes to communicate with the CPU.

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