Guide to abbreviations

Sometimes authors of text in a document in this wiki use an abbreviation without explaining what it means. The meaning of the abbreviation may be well-known to many readers yet unknown to some other readers.

The purpose of this page is to show the meanings of abbreviations which occur in pages of this wiki. Readers are asked not to include abbreviations which are not mentioned in at least one other page of the wiki. Readers are asked to maintain this as an alphabetically arranged list.

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BIOS

Basic Input/Output System, which is a software system that resides in EPROM or Flash memory in PCs and takes care of booting the operating system and hiding the hardware details from it

CD

Compact Disc

CMOS

Complementary Metal-Oxide-Silicon, which is an integrated circuit manufacturing technology used in most current digital chips

CPU

the central processing unit of a computer or microcomputer

DNS

Domain Name System, which is how human readable names like "laptop.org" are translated into the IP addresses actually used by computers to talk to each other on the Internet

ECC

Error Checking and Correction, which adds bits to each memory word so things won't fail if cosmic radiation randomly changes a few bits. Low cost computers rarely have this

ESD

Electrostatic Discharge, which a person can generate when touching a metal object after, for example, walking on a carpet in a very dry environment. This little shock can be over 3000V and easily damage electronic circuits

I/O

Input/Output

ISP

an Information Service Provider which is an organization which allows, often for a fee, individuals to connect to the internet.

JFFS2

Journaling Flash File System, Version 2.

NAND

Not AND

OLPC

One Laptop per Child

http://www.laptop.org/

p2p

Peer to Peer, which is a network architecture in which all computers have the same functionality in contrast to a client/server system

PCI

peripheral component interconnect, a computer bus for attaching peripheral devices to a computer motherboard.

USB

Universal Serial Bus