On a PC, usually the letter representing your computer's floppy disk drive. As in: Back up your disks using the 'A' drive.

(Advanced Digital Network) - Usually refers to a 56Kbps leased-line.

See: DSL

See: FTP

A small Java program that can be embedded in an HTML page. Applets differ from full-fledged Java applications in that they are not allowed to access certain resources on the local computer, such as files and serial devices (modems, printers, etc.), and are prohibited from communicating with most other computers across a network. The current rule is that an applet can only make an Internet connection to the computer from which the applet was sent.

See Also: HTML, Java

(Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) - The precursor to the Internet. Developed in the late 60’s and early 70’s by the US Department of Defense as an experiment in wide-area-networking that would survive a nuclear war.

See Also: Internet

(American Standard Code for Information Interchange) - This is the de facto world-wide standard for the code numbers used by computers to represent all the upper and lower-case Latin letters, numbers, punctuation, etc. There are 128 standard ASCII codes each of which can be represented by a 7 digit binary number: 0000000 through 1111111.