The following glossary defines 290 terms related to the IT Industry.  
Please do not reproduce without permission.

Active Channel

An Active Channel is a frequently updated information residing on a Web server. Users can subscribe to the channel if they have a CDF (Channel Definition Language) capable browser (e.g. Internet Explorer)

ActiveX

ActiveX is a brand name referring to a set of Microsoft's technologies and services based on COM (Component Object Model) widely released in 1997.  On the Internet, ActiveX can be used with IE versions 3 and above and with Netscape Navigator though plug-ins.  ActiveX control is a COM object, written as a DLL in a programming language like Visual Basic, that follows ActiveX standards.  Once downloaded, ActiveX controls have a large degree of freedom, presenting a security risk.  ActiveX controls have to be digitally signed by their creator.  Major competitor to ActiveX controls are JavaBeans.  Some hosts support ActiveX server components for ASP.

Address

Unique identifier of a web page. URL (Uniformed Resource Locator) is more frequently used for this purpose.

ADN

(Advanced Digital Network). A 56kbps dedicated communication line.

ADO

ActiveX Data Objects. Different data sources can be accessed in the same way within a single data model. The data can be located in various locations, like spreadsheets, databases or ordinary files.

ADSL

(Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Loop). High speed Internet access using the telephone line. It uses line-adaptive modulation and provides data speeds from 384kbps to 1.5 Mbps (upstream and downstream speeds are usually different). Unlike the dial up, it doesn't block the telephone line.

AIFF

Audio Interchange File Format. High quality audio file format introduced by Apple.

Anonymous FTP (Anon FTP)

A method for downloading and uploading files using FTP protocol without having a username or a password.  In place of a username, word "anonymous" is used, and in place of a password, email address is usually used.  If a hosting plan offers this service, your users will be able to download or upload files with FTP without having their own account.

Anonymous remailer

A SMTP server that allows sending anonymous email messages. It removes or changes the "From" field of all messages that it processes.

ANSI

American National Standards Institute. The U.S. standards organization.

Apache

Apache is an open-source (source code is freely available and can be shared) HTTP Web server software.  According to Netcraft survey, it is currently the most popular web server on the Net.  It is usually run on Unix operating system versions like Linux or BSD, but it can also be run on Windows.  It is a full-featured server with many powerful add-ons freely available.  Apache's major competitor is Microsoft's IIS.

Applet

Most often refers to a small Java program designed to run in a Web browser.  Java applets run in a sandbox, so they can't perform unauthorized functions like file reading or opening Net connections to other computer from your computer.

Archie

An online database of anonymous ftp sites and their contents. It allows to search the ftp repositories using file name queries.

Archive

Archives are large files containing valuable data. Archives are often compressed to save space.

Archive site

A server that contains archives. It can be accessed by FTP, E-mail or HTTP.

ARJ

One of the most popular compression formats.

ARPA

(Advanced Research Projects Agency) US governmental organization responsible for creating the ancestor of today's Internet.

ARPAnet

Network created by ARPA in 1969.

ASCII

(American Standard Code for Information Interchange). A standard for coding text files. Every character has an associated number and any text can be represented by a sequence of numbers.

ASP

Active Server Pages.  ASP is Microsoft's server-side scripting technology.  An Active Server Page has an .asp extension and it mixes HTML and scripting code that can be written in VBScript or JScript.  ASP is distributed with Microsoft's IIS web server, so most host using IIS will also offer ASP for dynamic web programming.  ASP.NET is the next version of ASP.  Other popular server-side scripting languages are Perl, PHP, ColdFusion, TCL, Python, and JSP.

Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM)

A set of network protocols designed for multimedia transmission. Data is partitioned into cells (53 bytes each) and passed along a virtual circuit. ATM allows for building very high speed networks.

Attachment

A part of an email message. Usually a file (a data file or a multimedia file) or a webpage. It is not a part of the text of the message, instead it is attached to the message.

AU

Audio file format for Unix systems.

Authentication

Authentication is used to confirm the identity of the other party involved in the data transmission.

AVI

Audio/Video Interleave. Audio file format used by Microsoft Widows.