The TORCH Graduate User Guide Issue 1.00, Nov 1984 The ...

The TORCH Graduate User Guide Issue 1.00, Nov 1984
GLOSSARY
application program
- one which carries out a specific user function (
e.g. financial planning). Application programs may
be specially written for users or provided as a
standard software package.
bit a single piece of binary information which
can only be either 1 or 0 (also sometimes referred
to by terms such as on/off, true/false, high/low).
Bits are grouped into bytes which can also be
grouped in words.
boot derived from phrase "to pull yourself up by your
own bootstraps(laces)". Refers to computer's
ability to use a few key initial instructions ("
triggered" by the keyboard or from power switches)
and use them to load the rest of a required
routine (such as the operating system) into
memory.
byte a group of 8 bits of information. The capacity of
storage media is usually quoted in either
thousands of bytes (Kbytes) or millions of bytes (
Mbytes). Note that these are not the normal
decimal terms but are binary 'round numbers' which
are close equivalents.Thus K = 1024, M = 1,048,576
(see "character").
character a single screen-displayed letter, digit or special
symbol, represented by a byte of memory within the
computer. There can be up to 256 different
characters because there are 256 different ways of
arranging the 8 bits which make up a byte. The
Graduate uses the industry-standard ASCII
character set.
command keyed-in instruction which can be understood and
immediately acted upon by the operating system.
The precise effect of commands varies between
different operating systems but in general their
main use is to allow the user to access
information stored on disc (e.g. a directory
listing of filenames). In addition, a command is
always provided to pass control from the operating
system to an application program.
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