Word Power Chris Bieda Ten Terms of the Computer Age, Release 4.0 TAPE DRIVE Some of the earliest personal computers (like Tandy's line) used Phillips (audio) tape cassettes as their sole mass storage medium, the same role we now cheerfully assign to diskettes, both floppy and hard. This is not what is meant by a "tape drive" in 1993, however. Today's tape drives fill a specialized role: making backups of large hard drives faster and simpler. Tapes, most in the industry-standard QIC (for "quarter-inch-cartridge," referring to the thickness of the tape cartridge) form, can contain anywhere from 60mb to +700mb (depending on the drive mechanics, and the software used), making them ideal for really big drives. The software used to run tape drives has evolved too, to the point where the drives can do an unattended backup, say during the night, when the system would otherwise be idle, freeing individuals from the chore of doin' the floppy shuttle. (Of course, a tape must be roomy enough to contain everything you mean to backup, if the process is to be both unattended and successful!) CONTROLLER CARD Most often heard of in the context of hard and floppy drives, a controller card converts the impulses flying around the "bus" (the data transportation mechanism that allows components of a PC to speak to each other) which are intended to command a drive into a language (actually, another set of impulses) that the drive(s) can understand. A drive without a controller is both deaf and mute, that is, it cannot be written to (hear) or read from (speak). And since they work so closely together, the controller and drive must be matched by a technically competent person, or one with an unjustifiable faith in the representations of manuals and salesmen--this is often a problem, as in "my drive won't work with the controller I bought." IDE If it seems a little goofy that an expensive piece of equipment like a hard drive is useless without a controller card, you probably wonder why someone hasn't combined the functions of interpreter and worker. Hence, "IDE," an acronym for "integrated drive electronics," a feature of a type of hard drive that has most of the functions of a controller card built into it! IDE drives, however, are not wholly devoid of the need for a controller-like device: there still must be an adapter (incorrectly, but often, called a controller) that connects the drive to the bus and listens for talk intended for the drive. However, these adapters are much simpler (cheaper) devices than controllers. The overwhelming virtue of IDE drives is that the matching of controller and drive that plagues non-IDE drive installations with fear, uncertainty and doubt is removed entirely: as the controlling function is supplied by the manufacturer for (and in!) the device to be controlled, IDE is often truly "plug 'n' play!" QEMM-386 An acronym, and popular name for, the Quarterdeck Expanded Memory Manager. Probably the most popular and widely-used tool for the management of memory on 386-and-higher systems, QEMM has exceeded its original design as an expanded memory manager to become a flexible tool for the management of all memory on these systems. QEMM allows for the creation of expanded memory out of extended memory (for those few applications, chiefly unextended DOS applications, that require it), the use of vacant portions of the 384K of memory that sits on top of the 640K "barrier," but below the first jot of extended memory, and provides powerful analytic and diagnostic tools as well. Some of the functions of QEMM are supplied by utilities included with DOS version 5.0, and QEMM has several worthy commercial competitors that match it almost feature-for-feature (e.g., Qualitas's 386Max), but time and time again, software reviewers give QEMM the blue ribbon. (A special version of QEMM written for 286-based IBM PS/2 systems is also available, called QEMM-50/60. QEMM-386 operates on all 386-and-higher systems.) BAD SECTOR A portion of a disk (floppy or hard) that has a physical defect that prevents reliable writing to, and reading from, it. All hard drives have bad sectors (though you might not be aware of them, due to clever manufacturers and even cleverer software)--and all hard drives will likely acquire more as they age, but there is no excuse for a bad sector on a floppy: toss it. ONLINE HELP No, you don't need a modem for online help; it refers to help that is available within an application, utility, or even an operating system itself, usually by pressing a hot key or combination of keys ("F1," or "ALT-H," or something else intuitive), which brings up either an index of sweet little lies, or, more usefully, an expla- nation of the particular feature or function of the program that you were working (or trying to) with when you popped out for a word of advice. POSTSCRIPT An image-description language written by the Adobe Corporation. It is essentially mathematical (a description of lines, points and curves), and so is portable to any imaginable computing platform; however, the complexity of the math makes it an ideal candidate for powerful machines! The use of PostScript is simple: a user creates an image (whether text rendered as an image, or a real image) in an application which renders it into the math of PostScript; these instructions are then sent to an output device (an interpreter), most often a page printer (laser), which reverses the process (reconstitutes the image); this image is then converted into a pattern of dots (some large, some small, some packed tightly, others not) by firmware known as the "rasterizer," which when impressed upon paper and viewed by our "Impression-able eyes" look pretty good. FIRMWARE "Software," "hardware," "firmware?" Firmware is software that is more-or-less permanently resident on a microchip. It is a useful medium for software that must always be available (hence the Basic Input-Output System or "BIOS" in your PC is firmware), changes rarely (if ever) and should be beyond the reach of clumsy operators. Technically, your microprocessor's "microcode" (the unique set of instructions it comprehends) is also firmware, but I have never heard it referred to that way. VECTOR GRAPHICS PostScript images are vector graphics. Did that help? No, huh? Okay, in physics, a vector is a thing having a direction in which it is going, and an energy ("oomph"); it is almost universally represented on some old, chipped chalkboard as a line by a fellow who has just a little too much enthusiasm for something so fundamentally dull. So it is here: a vector graphic is a collection of lines, having directions and oomph (or width). Of course, eventually these lines will be rendered by, say, a laser printer, where a string of really tiny dots scrunched up close looks like a line (which is, after all, appropriate, if you think back to high school geometry), but the important thing is that the image is fundamentally described by lines, their directions and widths. RASTER GRAPHICS Also known as "bitmap graphics." Hey, if vector graphics are lines rendered into dots, bitmaps just jump the line: they are, from the beginning, a collection of dots (some large, some small)! The advantages of bitmaps are that they can be drawn much faster than vector graphics (because of the elimination of the "dot-ification," or "rasterization," step) but they suffer from one mortal flaw: they cannot always be resized in a pleasing fashion. They look best when rendered at the resolution (size) they were intended for. An equivalent (if such a thing were possible, which it is not) vector graphic, on the other hand, may not look as good at that one perfect size (though most human eyes wouldn't notice, anyway), but it can be resized every which way, at unimaginable scales, and still look pretty good.