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I/O (Input/Output): the connection between your computer and another piece of
hardware (mouse, keyboard, etc.)
Initial Program Load (IPL): a feature built into BBS-compliant devices, describing
those devices as capable of loading and executing an OS, as well as being able to
provide control back to the BIOS if the loading attempt fails.
IPL: see Initial Program Load.
IRQ (Interrupt Request): an electronic request that runs from a hardware device to
the CPU. The interrupt controller assigns priorities to incoming requests and
delivers them to the CPU. It is important that there is only one device hooked up to
each IRQ line; doubling up devices on IRQ lines can lock up your system. Plug-n-
Play operating systems can take care of these details for you.
ISA (Industry Standard Architecture): a slower 8- or 16-bit bus (data pathway).
Latency: the amount of time that one part of a system spends waiting for another
part to catch up. This is most common when the system sends data out to a
peripheral device, and it waiting for the peripheral to send some data back
(peripherals tend to be slower than onboard system components).
Mirroring: see RAID.
NVRAM: ROM and EEPROM are both examples of Non-Volatile RAM, memory that
holds its data without power. DRAM, in contrast, is volatile.
OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers): Compaq or IBM package other
companies’ motherboards and hardware inside their case and sell them.
Parallel port: transmits the bits of a byte on eight different wires at the same time
(that is, in parallel form, eight bits at the same time).
PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect): a 32 or 64-bit local bus (data pathway)
which is faster than the ISA bus. Local buses are those which operate within a
single system (as opposed to a network bus, which connects multiple systems).
PCI PIO (PCI Programmable Input/Output) modes: the data transfer modes used
by IDE drives. These modes use the CPU for data transfer (in contrast, DMA
channels do not). PCI refers to the type of bus used by these modes to
communicate with the CPU.
PCI-to-PCI bridge: allows you to connect multiple PCI devices onto one PCI slot.
Pipeline burst SRAM: a type of RAM that can maintain it’s data as long as power
is provided to the memory chips. In this configuration, SRAM requests are pipelined,
which means that larger packets of data are sent to the memory at one time, and
acted upon quickly. This type of SRAM operates at bus speeds higher than 66MHz.