MCSA/MCSE Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-270): Installing ...

Glossary G-3
ANSI See American National Standards Institute (ANSI).
answer file A text file that supplies Windows XP Professional Setup with information
necessary during the installation process.
API See application programming interface (API).
APIPA See Automatic Private IP Addressing (APIPA).
APM See Advanced Power Management (APM).
application layer The top (seventh) layer of the OSI reference model. This layer
serves as the window that application processes use to access network services. It
represents the services that directly support user applications, such as software for
file transfers, database access, and e-mail. See also Open Systems Interconnection
(OSI) reference model.
application programming interface (API) A set of routines that an application
program uses to request and carry out lower-level services performed by the operating
system.
application protocols Protocols that work at the higher end of the OSI reference
model, providing application-to-application interaction and data exchange. Popular
application protocols include File Transfer Access and Management (FTAM), a
file access protocol; Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), a TCP/IP protocol for
transferring e-mail; Telnet, a TCP/IP protocol for logging on to remote hosts and
processing data locally; and NetWare Core Protocol (NCP), the primary protocol
used to transmit information between a NetWare server and its clients.
ARP See Address Resolution Protocol (ARP).
ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) A coding
scheme that assigns numeric values to letters, numbers, punctuation marks, and
certain other characters. By standardizing the values used for these characters,
ASCII enables computers and programs to exchange information.
asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL) A recent modem technology that converts
existing twisted-pair telephone lines into access paths for multimedia and
high-speed data communications. These new connections can transmit more than
8 Mbps to the subscriber and up to 1 Mbps from the subscriber. ADSL is recognized
as a physical layer transmission protocol for unshielded twisted-pair media.
Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) An advanced implementation of packet
switching that provides high-speed data transmission rates to send fixed-size cells
over local area networks (LANs) or wide area networks (WANs). Cells are 53
bytes—48 bytes of data with 5 additional bytes of address. ATM accommodates
voice, data, fax, real-time video, CD-quality audio, imaging, and multimegabit data
transmission. ATM uses switches as multiplexers to permit several computers to
put data on a network simultaneously. Most commercial ATM boards transmit data
at about 155 Mbps, but theoretically a rate of 1.2 Gbps is possible.