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.
BIOS means 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 means Compact Disc
CMOS means Complementary Metal-Oxide-Silicon, which is an integrated circuit manufacturing technology used in most current digital chips
CPU means the central processing unit of a computer or microcomputer
DNS means 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 means 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 means 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 means Input/Output
ISP means an Information Service Provider which is an organization which allows, often for a fee, individuals to connect to the internet.
JFFS2 means Journaling Flash File System, Version 2.
NAND means Not AND
OLPC means One Laptop per Child
p2p means Peer to Peer, which is a network architecture in which all computers have the same functionality in contrast to a client/server system
PCI means peripheral component interconnect, a computer bus for attaching peripheral devices to a computer motherboard.
USB means Universal Serial Bus