Wednesday, July 06, 2011

P....


*       Palm
A hand-held computer.

*       PC
Personal computer. Generally refers to computers running Windows with a Pentium processor.

*       PC board
Printed Circuit board. A board printed or etched with a circuit and processors. Power supplies, information storage devices, or changers are attached.

*       PDA
Personal Digital Assistant. A hand-held computer that can store daily appointments, phone numbers, addresses, and other important information. Most PDAs link to a desktop or laptop computer to download or upload information.

*       PDF
Portable Document Format. A format presented by Adobe Acrobat that allows documents to be shared over a variety of operating systems. Documents can contain words and pictures and be formatted to have electronic links to other parts of the document or to places on the web.

*       Pentium chip
Intel's fifth generation of sophisticated high-speed microprocessors. Pentium means .the fifth element..

*       Peripheral
Any external device attached to a computer to enhance operation. Examples include external hard drive, scanner, printer, speakers, keyboard, mouse, trackball, stylus and tablet, and joystick.

*       Personal computer (PC)
A single-user computer containing a central processing unit (CPU) and one or more memory circuits.

*       Petabyte
A measure of memory or storage capacity and is approximately a thousand terabytes.

*       Petaflop
A theoretical measure of a computer's speed and can be expressed as a thousand-trillion floating-point operations per second.

*       Platform
The operating system, such as UNIX., Macintosh., Windows., on which a computer is based.

*       Plug and play
Computer hardware or peripherals that come set up with necessary software so that when attached to a computer, they are .recognized. by the computer and are ready to use.


*       Pop-up menu
A menu window that opens vertically or horizontally on-screen to display context-related options. Also called drop-down menu or pull-down menu.

*       Power PC
A competitor of the Pentium chip. It is a new generation of powerful sophisticated microprocessors produced from an Apple-IBM-Motorola alliance.
 
*       Printer
A mechanical device for printing a computer's output on paper. There are three major types of printers: Dot matrix: creates individual letters, made up of a series of tiny ink dots, by punching a ribbon with the ends of tiny wires. (This type of printer is most often used in industrial settings, such as direct mail for labeling.)

*       Ink jet: sprays tiny droplets of ink particles onto paper.

*       Laser: uses a beam of light to reproduce the image of each page using a magnetic charge that attracts dry toner that is transferred to paper and sealed with heat.
 
*       Program
A precise series of instructions written in a computer language that tells the computer what to do and how to do it. Programs are also called .software. or .applications.

*       Programming language
A series of instructions written by a programmer according to a given set of rules or conventions (.syntax.). High-level programming languages are independent of the device on which the application (or program) will eventually run; low-level languages are specific to each program or platform. Programming language instructions are converted into programs in language specific to a particular machine or operating system (.machine language.) so that the computer can interpret and carry out the instructions. Some common programming languages are BASIC, C, C++, dBASE, FORTRAN, and Perl.

*       Puck
An input device, like a mouse. It has a magnifying glass with crosshairs on the front of it that allows the operator to position it precisely when tracing a drawing for use with CAD-CAM software.

*       Pull-down menu
A menu window that opens vertically on-screen to display context-related options. Also called drop-down menu or pop-up menu.

*     Push technology 
      Internet tool that delivers specific information directly to a user's desktop, eliminating the need to surf for it.
      PointCast, which delivers news in user-defined categories, is a popular example of this technology.

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