What is FMD?

Before IBM created its personal computer, two types of computer systems, Apple II and CP-M, dominated the microcomputer world. Neither of these systems were PC compatible, or Mac-compatible (the two primary standards in place today). The original IBM PC became a new standard in the microcomputer industry. Since then, hundreds of millions of PC-compatible systems have been sold, as the original PC grew into a large family of computers and peripherals. More software has been written for this computer family than for any other system on the market.

The Intel 8080 was a jazzed-up calculator chip. It was included in microcomputer kits which were little more than demonstration tools and did little except blink lights. Besides the 8080 chip, the Altair included a power supply, a front panel with a large number of lights and 256 bytes (not kilobytes) of memory. The kit sold for {$395} and had to be assembled.

An Extended Capabilities Port is about 10 times faster than the old standard one, but it is used the same way a regular parallel port is.

Spiders are also referred to as "bots" or "crawlers," and constantly scan the Internet for new and updated Web sites.

1983 Fred Cohen, while working on his dissertation, formally defines a computer virus as 'a computer program that can affect other computer programs by modifying them in such a way as to include a (possibly evolved)copy of itself.'

A virus hoax is usually an email that gets mailed in chain letter fashion describing some devastating highly unlikely type of virus, you can usually spot a hoax because there's no file attachment, no reference to a third party who can validate the claim and the general 'tone' of the message.

A search engine is a program that searches for Web documents with keyword (s) you specify. Yahoo!, Google, and AltaVista are just three examples of search engines that have been created to help you find information on the Web.

PROM stands for Programmable Read Only Memory and is not a type of expansion slot or bus design. Today, PCI has become the most used expansion slot design in PCs. Older PCs incorporated both PCI and ISA slots for computability with older expanssion devices.