Glossary

Interfaces: The hardware, firmware, and software to broadcast data across a physical medium

MAC: "Media Access Control" address, for identifying devices across a physical medium

ASCII: "American Standard Code for Information Interchange" standard to encode text characters as numbers

ARPA: "Advanced Research Projects Agency" US Government agency, now called DARPA (Defense ARPA)

UDP: "User Datagram Protocol" A subtype of Internet Protocol message for sending small individual "datagrams"

TCP: "Transmission Control Protocol" A subtype of Internet Protocol message for sending and receiving an ongoing stream of data

TTY: An interface to communicate with a Teletype/Teleprinter machine

IP: "Internet Protocol", often used as shorthand for Internet Protocol Address (IP Address)

OSI Model: Open Systems Interconnection model, as declared by the International Organization for Standards (ISO)

BCDIC: Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code, one of the earliest methods of encoding decimal numbers and text as binary, especially used with punch cards

EBCDIC: Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code, IBM's 8-bit character encoding used with punch cards for their mainframe systems

BNC: A type of connector commonly used for Thinnet networks, now mostly used for audio, video, and radio connections.

VPN: A virtual, private, computer network. Only systems on the network (your client, the server, other clients) can decrypt the data passed across a VPN.

ARP: Address Resolution Protocol, used to discover MAC addresses from IP addresses

DNS: Domain Name System, turns website names into IP addresses