address

AOL

applet

ASCII

ATM

attachment

address
An address is the unique identifier you need to either a) access the services of an Internet site or b) send e-mail. Another word for Internet site addresses is URL (see URL). Chances are you're already familiar with e-mail addresses. They're in the form of username@server.com and provide a unique identifier for your in-box so your mail can find you.

AOL
AOL stands for America Online, a leading online service. America Online provides Internet access plus a number of member services, such as news, special-interest areas, and virtual chat rooms. Our district does not use AOL,CompuServe, or any similiar commercial Internet Provider.

Applet

A small program or application.

ASCII
Say "as-key." ASCII files or "plain text format" files are text (letters and numbers and punctuation) that's free of any special formatting such as bold, italics, or fancy formatting. Every computer can open an ASCII file, and almost every word-processing program can make and save ASCII files. The simplest word-processing programs (such as Notepad, for you Windows users) use only ASCII and doesn't add any weird specialized commands or codes to it. (What weird commands or codes? Try opening up a Microsoft Word file in Notepad and you'll see.) The opposite of an ASCII file is a binary file. ASCII stands for "American Standard Code for Information Interchange."

ATM

Stands for Asynchronous Transfer Mode. It's the protocol that our district's network uses. Our network's backbone uses ATM as its protocol. However, some of our labs use other protocols, such as ethernet and token ring, but are still connected to the backbone by a bridge.

attachment

A file or document that is sent with an e-mail message.