Texas Instruments TravelMate 5000 Series User Reference Manual page 247

Glossary
bits per second — The speed at which your computer
receives or sends data to a device such as a modem or
serial printer.
boot — To start your computer; also called start-up and
power-up.
bps — See bits per second.
brightness control — A control that allows you to adjust the
brightness of the display.
buffer — A portion of the computer's memory that
temporarily holds information used by a program; for
example, the portion of a document you are working on
while using a word processor.
byte — A grouping of eight binary digits (bits) that your
computer treats as one unit; usually represents one character.
cache — A software device that accumulates copies of
recently used disk sectors in The application program
RAM.
can then read these copies without accessing the disk,
thereby increasing performance.
central processing unit ( ) — The electronic circuits in
CPU
your computer where most processing of information takes
place.
character — One of a set of symbols, such as letters,
numerals, or punctuation marks, that can express
information when collectively arranged. Although these
symbols are intelligible to humans, they are not understood
by your computer. For this reason, standardized character
codes consisting of groups of binary digits have been
developed to allow characters to be processed by
computers. In most cases, a character is represented by 8
bits or 1 byte.
Glossary 3