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Tuesday, September 27, 2011

IT Glossary

Malware
Malware is any program or file that is harmful to a computer user. Thus, malware includes computer viruses, worms, Trojan horses, and also spyware, programming that gathers information about a computer user without permission.

Macintosh
The Macintosh (often called "the Mac") was the first widely-sold personal computer with a graphical user interface (GUI) and a mouse. Apple Computer introduced the Macintosh in an ad during Super Bowl XVIII, on January 22, 1984, and offered it for sale two days later.The Mac was designed to provide users with a natural, intuitively understandable, and, in general, "user-friendly" computer interface.

Tape
In computers, tape is an external storage medium, usually both readable and writable, consisting of a loop of flexible celluloid-like material that can store data in the form of tiny magnetic fields that can be read and also erased. The magnetic tape is housed in a plastic cartridge similar to that of an audio or video cassette. Because the tapes, which are recorded by a device called a tape drive, are portable and inexpensive to purchase, tape is often used for backing up or archiving data.

The MAC Address
In a local area network (LAN) or other network, the MAC (Media Access Control) address is your computer's unique hardware number. When you're connected to the Internet from your computer (or host as the Internet protocol thinks of it), a correspondence table relates your IP address to your computer's physical (MAC) address on the LAN.