DEC AlphaServer 1000A Owner's Manual page 200

availability
The amount of scheduled time that a computing system provides application service
during the year. Availability is typically measured as a percentage of uptime per
year; or, if measured as system unavailability, as the number of hours of downtime
per year.
backplane
The main board or panel that connects all of the modules in a computer system.
bandwidth
Term used to express the rate of data transfer in a bus or I/O channel. It is expressed
as the amount of data that can be transferred in a given time, for example, as
megabytes per second.
boot device
The device from which the system bootstrap software is acquired.
boot flags
A flag is a system parameter set by the user. Boot flags contain information that is
read and used by the bootstrap software during a system bootstrap procedure.
boot
Short for bootstrap. To load an operating system into memory.
bootp
A load host protocol for UNIX host systems.
bootstrap
The process of loading an operating system into memory.
2 Glossary of Terms AlphaServer 1000A Owner's Guide