Technical Tip
by Milt Vine
While our industry has its own quirky terms like dingbats, hickeys and creeps, they don't come close to the wacky expressions that are growing up around digital communications. Last month, I talked about the importance electronic communications has in our industry. This month, I thought it would be interesting to look at some of the new lingo that's entering our lexicon, much of which I found in the fun new book, Wired Style, Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age, published by the editors of Wired. It's a great read.
In the beginning. The ARPAnet, based on the Defense Department Advanced Research Project Agency's research-sharing tool, was the world's first wide-area network (WAN), preceding the Internet by a decade. In 1969, Stanford Research Institute International; the University of California (Los Angeles and Santa Barbara), and the University of Utah established the first four nodes of the network. It was displaced by the National Science Foundation's NSFNet, a higher-speed network that began to be known as an internet as other regional nodes connected.
Do you know when the digital age began? If not, you're not alone. There are about as many opinions as chips in your CPU. One pundit thinks it was ushered in in 1972 with the videogame Pong. Another thinks Orson Wells and Walter Winchell were the inspiration, while still another credits creation of the transistor as the defining moment.
Bits, bands and bozos. A bit is a fraction of a byte, 8 bits make up one byte. More than describing just two sizes of the same thing, bits and bytes are used to describe different aspects about the flow of data; bits are used to talk about transmission speeds, bytes about storage capacity. Both are so small compared to the capacities of current equipment that a bit or byte has little value and, so, is grouped in thousands, (kilobit or Kbit), millions (megabyte or MB), or billions (gigabit and gigabyte).
Bandwidth is the capacity of a network to carry the bitstream, or flow of data, through wire and fiber optic channels. Unlimited bandwidth is regarded as nirvana to geeks. I'm sure many of us would agree, although there are others who compare it to free sex . . . not necessarily a good thing.
By the way, did you know there's such a thing as a bozo filter? It's a program that can filter out email or postings sent by individuals you'd rather not hear from. Now, there's a great idea!
The intelligence factor. The CIA has nothing on this brave new world. There are bugs (goofs in a software's source code) and agents--including bots (algorithmic software with action/reaction instructions to perform tasks in response to events; i.e., spellcheckers) and knowbots, or knowledge robots, who, after they get to know you, will do things for you, like screen incoming mail or recommend tomorrow night's menu. You can finger, or gather information about, a network user. There's cryptography, a mathematical formula for encrypting or securing digital communications. And on the Internet, the gopher--a protocol that facilitates file transfers and browsing--replaces the spy mole.
Cybercruising. Unless you're also teaching at an .edu institution, you probably spend most of your Internet time navigating the World Wide Web with a graphical browser like Mosaic, one of the earliest; the widely-used Netscape; HotJava, the Johnny-come-lately; or, never far from the fray, Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Not to be confused with browsers are search engines like Yahoo! and AltaVista, which do the actual looking up of information.
Virtual cuisine. As in the real world, the cyberworld has its own rules, or netiquette. For instance: long the bane of processed meat products, spam in the virtual world has an equally unpleasant denotation. Spam is electronic garbage; specifically, one junk email message sent to multiple recipients. Spamming is highly frowned upon and likely to get the sender flamed, a flame being an angry, often haranguing, email or posting. Fortunately, to cleanse your palate there's a cookie, indeed a treat, especially for those of us with websites. An identification tool stored on your hard disk, cookies provide a way of tracking the number of visitors, or hits, to sites. Finally, there's the cracker, which is not to be confused with a hacker, who breaks into computer systems.
This is art? Every culture has to have its art, and cyberculture is no exception. You might use, or have received in an email, emoticons; those happy, sad, wry or worried faces (read from landscape view), made up of keyboard symbols. The happy face- :) -is the most prevalent and by now most clichèd, while newer ones like the look of alarm (:-O) are continually being created. This is just a sampling of the huge number of new terms that have come into common parlance. Even more staggering, this is just the dawn of the digital age. We need to be in step. Our success depends on our ability to walk the walk and talk the talk of clients. I hope this provided a little help with the latter.
Milt Vine is president of Seattle Bindery, a post-production house specializing in
index tabbing in addition to providing folding, stitching, perfect binding, scoring ,
perforating and trimming services for the trade. You can reach Milt at 206/682-2558.
© 1997, Seattle Bindery Reprinted from Northwest Trader, March, 1997.