Texas Instruments 3000 - Manual (Page 181)

Glossary
boot - To start your computer; also called start-up and power-up.
bps - See bits per second.
brightness control - A control that allows you to adjust the brightness of the display.
buffer - A portion of the computer's memory that temporarily holds information used by a
program; for example, the portion of a document you are working on while using a word
processor.
bug - An error in the hardware or software of your computer that causes an operation to
perform incorrectly.
byte - A grouping of eight binary digits (bits) that your computer treats as one unit;
usually represents one character.
cache - A software device that accumulates copies of recently used disk sectors in RAM.
The application program can then read these copies without accessing the disk, thereby
speeding up the performance of the application.
central processing unit (CPU) - The electronic circuits in your computer where most
processing of information takes place.
character - One of a set of symbols, such as letters, numerals, or punctuation marks, that
can express information when collectively arranged. Although these symbols are
intelligible to humans, they are not understood by your computer. For this reason,
standardized character codes consisting of groups of binary digits have been developed to
allow characters to be processed by computers. In most cases, a character is represented
by 8 bits or I byte.
Glossary 3