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Yellow Book - When referred to CD-ROMS the standard developed by Phillips and Sony (who also were the companies who developed the audio CD Red Book standard. These books actually came in red and yellow binders.) This standard created a Volume Table of Contents (VTOC) for CD-ROMs.

Ymodem - File-transfer protocol similar to the enhanced 1K version of Xmodem. Ymodem also allows multiple file transmission, performs cyclic redundancy checks (CRC), and can reduce the transfer size to compensate for a poor connections.

Yoke - Input device used with computer games, typically with flight simulations games, that allows the user to fly up or down, back or forth by pulling or pushing the steering wheel-like device.

YTalk
A multi-user chat program which works almost exactly like the standard Unix talk program and even communicates with the same talk daemon(s). Moreover, YTalk supports multiple connections.

NERDWORD - Z

Z force
A touch screen's sensitivity to pressure.

Zap
The complete elimination of data on a storage medium, leaving the medium available for future storage.

Z Object Publishing Environment
A free, open-source web application platform used for building high-performance, dynamic Web sites.

Z shell
A UNIX command interpreter.

z-fold paper
Continuous paper with holes on the edges, folded like a "z" with each page folded in the opposite direction of the page before. It is used in tractor-feed dot matrix printers; after printing, the pages are separated along the perforations and the edge strips are torn off.

Z-mail
A commercial mail user agent for MS-DOS and Unix.

Z3
An early computer from the 1940s

Z39.50
An ANSI (American National Standards Institute) search and retrieval protocol used by WAIS (Wide Area Information Service).

Zone
Located inside a local-area network (LAN), zones are subsets of the larger network.

ZBR
Zone Bit Recording (also called zone constant angular velocity).
Zone bit recording is a method of storing data on a disk in which the disk rotates at constant angular velocity, but the outer tracks have higher recording density than on a conventional disk, thus making it possible to store more data. This is achieved by dividing the disk into concentric zones and changing the clock rate as the read/write head moves from one zone to another.

Zero Insertion Force socket
ZIF socket). A special socket for plugging in integrated circuits easily. The socket can be opened with a small lever or screw; the chip is dropped in, then the socket is closed.

Zip disk
A 3.5" removable cartridge used with the Iomega Zip drive. Zip disks can store 25MB or 100MB, and are used to back up data or transfer data from one computer to another.

Zip drive
A small, lightweight, portable disk drive from Iomega, which uses 100-megabyte 3.5" removable cartridges.

zip file
A file which has been compressed with PKZIP or compatible software. Zip files are indicated by the .ZIP filename extension, and can be unpacked with PKUNZIP or WinZip.

Zmodem or Z-modem
A file transfer protocol which transmits data between modems in blocks of 512 bytes. It is fast because it does not wait for positive acknowledgment (ACK) after each block of data, but will resend a block if it receives a negative acknowledgment (NAK). If a file transfer is interrupted, Zmodem can resume the transfer later and send only the part of the file that was not yet sent, which can save a lot of time. Zmodem is an advancement over Xmodem and Ymodem.

Zero out - The first 256 bytes of memory in computer systems based on the 5602 microprocessor.

Zero suppression - To remove zeros from a number without affecting its value. The number 000.222, for example, could be written as .222.

Zero wait state - State where RAM runs at its maximum speed when processing responses from the microprocessor.

Compiled by Suhana D Basu
[email protected]

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