§ 25 - Glossary

ACIA

Asynchronous Communications Interface Adaptor — this is a serial communications chip often used to implement RS-232 ports on vintage computers

Altair

The first significant PC

Amiga

A PC by Commodore

AmigaDOS

The operating system of the Amiga computer

API

Application Programmer Interface - the part of an operating system that allows an application to use its resources

Apple

A software and hardware company

ASCII

American Standard Code for Information Interchange

BASIC

An early computyer language

C

A high level computer language that is extremely efficient; so much so that some people (incorrectly) characterize it as a low-level language.

C++

A high level language derived from C; it has more features, but tends to produce very bloated executables

Commodore

A software and hardware company

CP/M

A computer operating system

CPU

Central Processing Unit, also referred to as the processor, or the microprocessor

CSC

A computer software company

DDA

Digital Differential Analyzer

DIP

Dual Inline Package

DMA

Direct Memory Access

DOS

Disk Operating System

FLEX

A disk operating system by TSC

FMS

File Management System

Forth

An early computer language, notable for taking an RPN approach.

Frank Hogg Laboratories

A computer software company

GIMIX

A computer hardware manufacturing company

Hitachi

A semiconductor manufacturing company

Host

The computer that the FLEX emulation is running on

I/O

Input / Output

Intel

A semiconductor manufacturing company

k

Kilobytes - Generally 1024, or 2^10 bytes, but sometimes (sigh) 1,000 bytes

LED

Light Emitting Diode

MB

MegaBytes - 2^20 bytes, or 1,048,567 bytes

MHz

MegaHertz - A million operations per second

Micron

A computer manufacturing company

Microsoft

A computer hardware and software company. Most notably here, the vendor of Win95 and Win98

MITS

Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems — A computer manufacturing company, initially producing computers in kit form

Motorola

A semiconductor manufacturing company

mS

Milliseconds — one thousandth of a second

OS

Operating System

PC

Personal Computer

Pentium

A microprocessor model from Intel

Percom

A software and hardware company

PSYMON

A low level monitor by Percom

R/W

Read/Write

RAM

Random Access Memory

ROM

Read Only Memory

RPN

Reverse Polish Notation

RTC

Real Time Clock

SAS

SAS Institute, previously Lifeboat Associates, vendors of the Lattice C compiler

SOROC

A computer terminal manufacturing company

SS-50

The main 50-pin card bus in a SWTPC or GIMIX computer

SWTPC

SouthWest Technical Products Corporation

TSC

Technical Systems Consultants.

TTL

Transistor-Transistor Logic — a technology for computer logic chips

UC

User Command (in FLEX)

uS

Microseconds — one millionth of a second

VDisk

Virtual Disk - a file under the Host operating system that is treated as a disk drive by the ReFLEX emulator core

VFP

Virtual Front Panel

VIA

Versatile Interface Adaptor — a chip containing parallel ports, timers and so forth.

Win95

Windows 95 - A computer operating system by Microsoft

Win98

Windows 98 - A computer operating system by Microsoft

WinXP

Windows XP - A computer operating system by Microsoft

Y2K

A date rollover bug that occurs due to using two digits for the year. The assumption was that no one had to worry about the first two digits, which were assumed to be "19." Unfortunately, when the year 2000 rolled around, all that software thought it was 1900, because of that assumption. Oops. FLEX date storage suffers from this problem. So welcome to the 20th century. Again. :)

 

This manual was generated with wtfm wtfm uses aa_macro and SqLite aa_macro uses python 2.7