Filter
Top Products
Glossary A-1
GLOSSARY
Address Mask (also referred to as NetMask)
A bit mask used to select bits from an IP address for subnet addressing.
The mask is 32 bits long, and selects the network portion of the IP
address and one or more bits of the local portion.
ANSI (American National Standards Institute)
A group that defines U.S. standards for the information processing
industry. ANSI participates in defining network protocol standards.
API (Application Program Interface)
An API is a specification of the methods an application programmer can
use to access services provided by a software module. In the case of a
network, the API specifies the interface to the network software.
In TCP/IP, the idea of a “Socket” as the endpoint of a connection is used.
A “socket” then refers to an abstraction to define the endpoint of a
connection as far as the API is concerned. A socket can be created,
opened, read, written, closed, and deleted in much the same way a file is
handled in DOS. The difference is that two sockets must exist, normally
on two hosts, before a connection can be made. A read operation on one
side must always have a matching write operation on the other side.
A common way of interfacing a terminal emulator to networking software
in a PC is to use Interrupt 14h. This is the PC BIOS entry point for serial
port support, but when used for networking purposes, the original entry
point is reused to provide a similar, but much expanded function. In
addition to the native character at a time transfer, block transfers are also
offered to increase throughput.
A