American National Standard
<standard> (ANS) A common prefix for ANSI documents or standards, e.g.:
"ANS Forth", or "American National Standard X3.215-1994".
(1998-07-01)
Nearby terms:
AMD Am2903 « AMD Am2910 « AMD K7 « American
National Standard » American National Standards
Institute » American Society of Mechanical Engineers
» American Standard Code for Information Interchange
American National Standards Institute
<body, standard> (ANSI) The private, non-profit organisation (501(c)3)
responsible for approving US standards in many areas, including computers and
communications. ANSI is a member of ISO. ANSI sells ANSI and ISO (international)
standards.
ANSI Home.
Address: New York, NY 10036, USA. Sales: 1430 Broadway, NY NY 10018. Telephone:
+1 (212) 642 4900.
(2004-01-14)
Nearby terms:
AMD Am2910 « AMD K7 « American National Standard «
American National Standards Institute » American
Society of Mechanical Engineers » American Standard
Code for Information Interchange » American
Telephone and Telegraph, Inc.
American Society of Mechanical Engineers
<body> (ASME) A group involved in CAD standardisation.
(1995-04-21)
Nearby terms:
AMD K7 « American National Standard « American
National Standards Institute « American Society
of Mechanical Engineers » American Standard Code
for Information Interchange » American Telephone and
Telegraph, Inc. » American Wire Gauge
American Standard Code for Information Interchange
The basis of character sets used in almost all present-day computers. US-ASCII
uses only the lower seven bits (character points 0 to 127) to convey some
control codes, space, numbers, most basic punctuation, and unaccented letters
a-z and A-Z. More modern coded character sets (e.g., Latin-1, Unicode) define
extensions to ASCII for values above 127 for conveying special Latin characters
(like accented characters, or German ess-tsett), characters from non-Latin
writing systems (e.g., Cyrillic, or Han characters), and such desirable glyphs
as distinct open- and close-quotation marks. ASCII replaced earlier systems such
as EBCDIC and Baudot, which used fewer bytes, but were each broken in their own
way.
Computers are much pickier about spelling than humans; thus, hackers need to be
very precise when talking about characters, and have developed a considerable
amount of verbal shorthand for them. Every character has one or more names -
some formal, some concise, some silly.
Individual characters are listed in this dictionary with alternative names from
revision 2.3 of the Usenet ASCII pronunciation guide in rough order of
popularity, including their official ITU-T names and the particularly silly
names introduced by INTERCAL.
See V ampersand, asterisk, back quote, backslash, caret, colon, comma,
commercial at, control-C, dollar, dot, double quote, equals, exclamation mark,
greater than, hash, left bracket, left parenthesis, less than, minus,
parentheses, oblique stroke, percent, plus, question mark, right brace, right
brace, right bracket, right parenthesis, semicolon, single quote, space, tilde,
underscore, vertical bar, zero.
Some other common usages cause odd overlaps. The "#", "$", ">", and "&"
characters, for example, are all pronounced "hex" in different communities
because various assemblers use them as a prefix tag for hexadecimal constants
(in particular, "#" in many assembler-programming cultures, "$" in the 6502
world, ">" at Texas Instruments, and "&" on the BBC Micro, Acorn Archimedes,
Sinclair, and some Zilog Z80 machines). See also splat.
The inability of US-ASCII to correctly represent nearly any language other than
English became an obvious and intolerable misfeature as computer use outside the
US and UK became the rule rather than the exception (see software rot). And so
national extensions to US-ASCII were developed, such as Latin-1.
Hardware and software from the US still tends to embody the assumption that
US-ASCII is the universal character set and that words of text consist entirely
of byte values 65-90 and 97-122 (A-Z and a-z); this is a major irritant to
people who want to use a character set suited to their own languages.
Perversely, though, efforts to solve this problem by proliferating sets of
national characters produced an evolutionary pressure (especially in protocol
design, e.g., the URL standard) to stick to US-ASCII as a subset common to all
those in use, and therefore to stick to English as the language encodable with
the common subset of all the ASCII dialects. This basic problem with having a
multiplicity of national character sets ended up being a prime justification for
Unicode, which was designed, ostensibly, to be the *one* ASCII extension anyone
will need.
A system is described as "eight-bit clean" if it doesn't mangle text with byte
values above 127, as some older systems did.
See also ASCII character table, Yu-Shiang Whole Fish.
(1995-03-06)
Nearby terms:
American National Standard « American National
Standards Institute « American Society of Mechanical
Engineers «
American Standard Code for Information Interchange
» American Telephone and Telegraph, Inc. » American
Wire Gauge » America On-Line, Inc.
American Telephone and Telegraph, Inc.
<company, telecommunications, Unix, C> (AT&T) One of the largest US
telecommunications providers. Also noted for being the birthplace of the Unix
operating system and the C and C++ programming languages.
AT&T was incorporated in 1885, but traces its lineage to Alexander Graham Bell
and his invention of the telephone in 1876. As parent company of the former Bell
System, AT&T's primary mission was to provide telephone service to virtually
everyone in the United States. In its first 50 years, AT&T established
subsidiaries and allied companies in more than a dozen other countries. It sold
these interests in 1925 and focused on achieving its mission in the United
States. It did, however, continue to provide international long distance
service.
The Bell System was dissolved at the end of 1983 with AT&T's divestiture of the
Bell telephone companies.
AT&T split into three parts in 1996, one of which is Lucent Tecnologies, the
former systems and equipment portion of AT&T (including Bell Laboratories).
See also 3DO, Advanced RISC Machine, Berkeley Software Distribution, Bell
Laboratories, Concurrent C, Death Star, dinosaurs mating, InterNIC, System V,
Nawk, Open Look, rc, S, Standard ML of New Jersey, Unix International, Unix
conspiracy, USG Unix, Unix System Laboratories.
AT&T Home.
(2002-06-21)
Nearby terms:
American National Standards Institute « American
Society of Mechanical Engineers « American Standard
Code for Information Interchange « American
Telephone and Telegraph, Inc. » American Wire
Gauge » America On-Line, Inc. » America's Multimedia
Online
American Wire Gauge
<hardware, standard> (AWG, sometimes "Brown and Sharpe Wire Gauge") A
U.S. standard set of non-ferrous wire conductor sizes. Typical household wiring
is AWG number 12 or 14. Telephone wire is usually 22, 24, or 26. The higher the
gauge number, the smaller the diameter and the thinner the wire. Thicker wire is
better for long distances due to its lower resistance per unit length.
(2001-03-26)
Nearby terms:
American Society of Mechanical Engineers « American
Standard Code for Information Interchange « American
Telephone and Telegraph, Inc. « American Wire
Gauge » America On-Line, Inc. » America's
Multimedia Online » AMI
America On-Line, Inc.
<company, communications> (AOL) A US on-line service provider based in
Vienna, Virginia, USA. AOL claims to be the largest and fastest growing provider
of on-line services in the world, with the most active subscriber base. AOL
offers its three million subscribers electronic mail, interactive newspapers and
magazines, conferencing, software libraries, computing support, and on-line
classes.
In October 1994 AOL made Internet FTP available to its members and in May 1995,
full Internet access including World-Wide Web.
AOL's main competitors are Prodigy and Compuserve.
Home.
(1997-08-26)
Nearby terms:
American Standard Code for Information Interchange «
American Telephone and Telegraph, Inc. « American
Wire Gauge « America On-Line, Inc. »
America's Multimedia Online » AMI » Amiga
America's Multimedia Online
<company, World-Wide Web> (AMO) An Internet technologies company which
invented Never Offline in 1995 and was officially started in 1996.
Home.
E-mail: AMO <amo@amo.net>.
Address: Albuquerque, NM, USA.
(1999-11-03)
Nearby terms:
American Telephone and Telegraph, Inc. « American
Wire Gauge « America On-Line, Inc. « America's
Multimedia Online
» AMI » Amiga » Amiga E
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