Ever wondered what a particular acronym stands for? Find the answer in our comprehensive reference guide to computer industry acronyms. RTFM!
Ever wondered what a particular acronym stands for? Find the answer in our comprehensive reference guide to computer industry acronyms. RTFM!
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3D
3-Dimensional; referring to graphics or images that have a three dimensional appearance (as opposed to a “flat” screen image of a document or photo). Especially applies to games, animation and cinematic special effects.
3GL
3rd Generation Language; refers to programming languages such as C++.
4K
A digital film standard resolution. Means four thousand pixels (or 4,096); refers to cinematic displays with four thousand pixels in a given dimension. Used in digital projection cinemas.
A
A2DP
Advanced Audio Distribution Profile; a technology standard for streaming high quality audio between devices over a Bluetooth connection.
.AAC (file format)
Advanced Audio Coding; an audio compression file format popularised by Apple’s iTunes service and the Apple iPod player. It compresses music and audio in a lossy fashion, in other words it discards information of incidental value. It also allows integrated DRM.
AACS
Advanced Access Content System; a technology for Digital Rights Management, used in digital music files especially.
AFAIK
As Far As I Know; a shorthand term used in Internet Relay Chat, online forums or bulletin boards.
AFK
Away From Keyboard; a shorthand term used in Internet Relay Chat, online forums or bulletin boards.
AGP
Advanced Graphics Port; a system for graphics cards to interface with PC motherboards, especially video cards with 3D acceleration. AGP is being replaces by PCI Express.
AHCI
Advanced Host Controller Interface; a standard interface used by SATA devices.
AI
Artificial Intelligence; technology that allows machines or computers to “think” and solve simple problems without assistance. AI is used in aeroplane autopilot systems, robotics, specialist software (especially Internet security software) and computer games.
AJAX
Asynchronous Javascript And XML; a modern combination of software technologies for advanced web pages and web applications.
.ANI (file format)
This is an animated cursor file under Microsoft Windows.
ANSI
American National Standards Institute; a group that creates standards for American products and technology. A prominent product of their standardisation efforts is ANSI C, the programming language that can theoretically be used across any system that supports it.
AMD
Advanced Micro Devices; a semiconductor company that makes alternative computer processors, in direct competition with Intel.
ARPANET
Advanced Research Projects Agency Network; the experimental precursor to the Internet.
ASCII
American Standard Code for Information Interchange; a 255-character system of letters, numbers, punctuation marks, currency symbols and printer control codes that is used in basic text on computers, for raw text documents, text in the operating system and command-line environments. ASCII stores no information about font, colour, or advanced page formatting elements as you would find in a Microsoft Word document.
ASIC
Application Specific Integrated Circuit; any circuit that is not general purpose - that is, a specialised circuit for a particular task or application. This term can be applied to most computer circuitry.
ASP
Active Server Pages, a Microsoft system for generating dynamic web pages using scripts. Uses the file extension .ASPX. Superseded by ASP.NET.
ATI
Array Technologies Incorporated, a graphics chipset company that was considered NVIDIA’s key competition. Acquired by AMD in 2006.
ATA
Advanced Technology Attachment; a standard for attaching storage devices to computers, such as hard drives and DVD drives. ATA refers to Parallel ATA (PATA), which has had the “parallel” prefix added since it has been superseded by SATA.
Terms EIDE, ATAPI and IDE have virtually the same meaning as ATA.
ATX
Advanced Technology eXtended; a form factor specification by Intel for computer cases, power supplies, motherboards and connectors.
.AVI
Audio-Video Interleave, a file format by Microsoft that can contain video and audio. It is known as a “container format” - the file within can use various different video or audio compression codecs.
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