A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

A

Acquiring Bank
A bank that processes online payments on your behalf, levies a fee and pays the balance into your bank account.

ADN (Advanced Digital Network)
Usually refers to a 56Kbps leased-line.

ADSL
Abbreviation of Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line. ADSL is a technology that transforms a standard telephone line into a high-speed ‘always on’ internet connection capable of simultaneously carrying voice and data. It is termed ‘asymmetric’ because data moves in one direction faster than in the other i.e. data is transmitted faster from the exchange to you rather than from your premises to the exchange.

Analog
The technology used by the original mobile phones. Like traditional radio broadcasts, phone conversations and information are transmitted in the form of a continually varying current or radio wave. The transfer of information can be slow, so newer digital technology has largely taken its place.

Apache
A free web server program. Apache is usually associated with Unix/Linux, but is also available for Windows. A web server is the high-powered computer that that runs your website.

Applet
A small Java program that can be embedded in an HTML page. Applets differ from full-fledged Java applications in that they are not allowed to access certain resources on the local computer, such as files and serial devices (modems, printers, etc.), and are prohibited from communicating with most other computers across a network. The common rule is that an applet can only make an Internet connection to the computer from which the applet was sent.

Application Server
Server software that manages one or more other pieces of software in a way that makes the managed software available over a network, usually to a Web server. By having a piece of software manage other software packages it is possible to use resources like memory and database access more efficiently than if each of the managed packages responded directly to requests.

Archie
A tool (software) for finding files stored on anonymous FTP sites. You need to know the exact file name or a substring of it. By 1999 Archie had been almost completely replaced by web-based search engines.
Back when FTP was the main way people moved files over the Internet Archie was quite popular.

ARPANet (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network)
The precursor to the Internet. Developed in the late 60’s and early 70’s by the US Department of Defence as an experiment in wide-area-networking to connect together computers that were each running different system so that people at one location could use computing resources from another location.

ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange)
This is the defacto world-wide standard for the code numbers used by computers to represent all the upper and lower-case Latin letters, numbers, punctuation, etc. There are 128 standard ASCII codes each of which can be represented by a 7 digit binary number: 0000000 through 1111111.

ASP (active server page)
These are used on database driven websites.

ASP (Application service provider)
company that offers companies access to software applications over the Internet.

Atom
An evolving protocol for syndication and sharing of content.
Atom is being developed as a successor to and improvement over RSS and is more complex than RSS while offering support for additional features such digital signatures, geographic location of author, possibly security/encryption, licensing, etc.
Like RSS, Atom is an XML-based specification.

Audio conferencing
A bureau service provided by telephone service providers (such as BT) can allow you to have a telephone conference call involving several people in different locations.

Attachment
A file ‘paper clipped’ and sent with an e-mail message.