These whatis pages serve as a curated reference of definitions, jargon, and computer‑related terms you’ll encounter. Whether you’re decoding acronyms, clarifying system names, or exploring foundational concepts in computing and digital technology, our goal is to demystify the terms so you can move forward with confidence.

# — Numeric & Symbolic Terms
A — Abstraction, Algorithm, API, AI
B — Backup, Binary, Bandwidth
B+tree B-tree Back Door Back end Backgammon Backbone Cabal Backbone Site Background Backspace and Overstrike Backup Backus-Naur Form Backward Combatability BAD Bad Thing Bag on the Side Bagbiter BAMF Banana Label Banana Problem Bandwidth Bang Bang On Bang Path Banner Bar Bare Metal Barf Barfulation Barfulous Baroque BartleMUD Base64 Bash BASIC Basic Input/Output System Batch Bathtub Curve Battery Baud Baud Barf Baz BBoard BBS BC Beam Beanie Key Beep BeiDou Beige Toaster Bells and Whistles Bells, Whistles and Gongs Benchmark Berkeley Quality Software Berklix Berserking Berzerkeley Beta BFI Bible BiCapitalization BIFF Big Gray Wall Big Iron Big Red Switch Big Room, the Big Win Big-Endian BigNum Bigot Binary Binary Frequency Shift Keying Binary Phase Shift Keying bit Bit Bang Bit Bashing Bit Bucket Bit Decay Bit Error Rate Bit Error Rate Tester Bit Rot Bit Twiddling Bit-paired Keyboard bitBLT BITNET bits Bitty Box Bitwise Operations Bixie BK Black Art Black Hole Black Magic Blast Blat Bletch Bletcherous Blinkenlights BLIT Blitter Blivet Blob Block Block Scope Block Transfer Computations Blow an EPROM Blow Away Blow Out Blow Past Blow Up BLT Blue Book Blue Glue Blue Goo Bluetooth Boa Board Boat Anchor Bogo Sort Bogometer Bogon Bogon Filter Bogon Flux Bogosity Bogotify Bogue Out Bogus Bohr Bug Boink Bomb Bombe Bondage And Discipline Language Bonk/Oif Book Titles Boolean Boolean Logic Boot Bootloader Bootstrap Border Gateway Protocol Bottom-up Implementation Bounce Bounce Message Bounding Volume Hierarchy Box Boxed Comments Boxen Boxology Bozotic BQS Brain Damaged Brain Dead Brain Dump Braino Branch to Fishkill Brand Brand Brand Break Breath-of-Life Packet Breedle Bring X to its Knees Brittle Broadcast Storm broadcasting Broken Broken Arrow Broket Brooks' Law Brownian Motion Browser Exploit Against SSL/TLS BRS Brute Force Brute Force and Ignorance BSD Bubble Sort Bucky Bits Buffer Overflow Buffering Bug Bug-Compatible Bug-for-Bug Compatible Buglix Built-In Self-Test Bulletproof Bum Bump Burble Buried Treasure Burn-in Period Burst Page Business Intelligence Busy-Wait Buzz Buzz Word Quotient' By Hand Byte Bytecode Bytesexual
C — Cache, Cloud, CPU
Cache Cache Coherency Calendar California Consumer Privacy Act CAP Theorem Capacitor Carson’s Rule Column Address Strobe Certificate Authority Certificate Revocation List ChaCha20 Chapel Character Encoding Cipher Cipher Block Chaining Cipher-based Message Authentication Code Circuit Design Circular Reference Command-Line Interface Command Run On Notice Cloud Computing Cloud-Storage Clock Clock Cycle Clock Signal Code Codebreaking Common Intermediate Language Common Language Runtime Comma-Separated Values Communication Computer-Aided Design Computer-Aided Manufacturing Convolutional Neural Network Computer Numerical Control Compiler Combinational Circuit Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart Compute Unified Device Architecture CUDA Deep Neural Network library Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Congestion Window Reduced Concurrency Conditional Consensus Consent Management Platform Consistency Context Content Delivery Network Content Security Policy Continuous Integration Continuous-Time Linear Equalizer Control Logic Control Unit country code Top-Level Domains Cross-Origin Resource Sharing CouchDB Covariance Matrix Central Processing Unit Customer Premises Equipment Customer Relationship Management Create, Read, Update, Delete Cyclic Redundancy Check Cryptanalysis Cryptography Cryptographic Module Validation Program Communications Security Establishment Cascading Style Sheets C shell Counter Mode Current Client for URL Cybersecurity Cycle Power
D — Data, DNS, Download
D. C. Power Lab DD DDT DEADBEEF DEC Wars DEChead DES DNS DOS DP DPB DPer DRECNET DWIM Daemon Damerau-Levenshtein Dangling Pointer Datamation Data Data Analysis Data Manipulation Data Strobe Data Transmission Dataflow Database Dashboard Day Mode Dead Code Deadlock Deadly Embrace Death Star Debugging Deep Hack Mode Deep Magic Deep Space Defenestration Defined as Dehose De-Rezz Delint Delta Demented Demigod Demo Demo Mode Demon Depeditate Deprecated Deserves to Lose Desk Check Devil Book Devo Decision Feedback Equalizer Decision Tree DELETE Delegation Signer Design Patterns Deterministic Entropy Deterministic Systems Device Management Device Under Test Diode Dickless Workstation Dictionary Flame Diddle Diff Digit Digital Digital Forensics Digital Logic Digital Mobile Radio Digital Signal Processing Digital Signal Processor Digital Signature Digital Subscriber Line Digital Subscriber Line Access Multiplexer Digital Visual Interface Digital Watermarking Digital-to-Analog Converter Dimensionality Reduction Dinosaur Dinosaur Pen Dinosaurs Mating Dirty Power Directory Information Tree Disk Farm Disk Partitioning Display Hack DisplayPort Display Stream Compression Dissociated Press Distributed Denial of Service Distributed Systems Distribution Distribution Point Unit Domain Name System Key Domain Name System Security Extensions Domainist Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance DomainKeys Identified Mail Don't do that, then! Dongle Dongle-Disk Donuts Doorstop Dot File Doc Docs Doco Docker Document Object Model Documentation Dodgy DogCow Dogwash Discover, Offer, Request, and Acknowledge Discrete MultiTone Discrete Logarithm Problem Double Bucky Double DECkers Doubled Sig Double Data Rate Double Data Rate 1 Double Data Rate 2 Double Data Rate 3 Double Data Rate 4 Double Data Rate 5 Down Download Dragon Dragon Book Drain Drawings Drive Dread High-bit Disease Driver Droid Drool-Proof Paper Drop on the Floor Drop Outs Drop-ins Drugged Drunk Mouse Syndrome Dual In-line Memory Module Dumbass Attack Dumbed Down Dump Dup Killer Dup Loop Durability Dusty Deck Dynamic Array Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol for IPv4 Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol for IPv6 Dynamic Random Access Memory Dynner DynamoDB Direct Current Direct2D Direct3D DirectCompute DirectInput Direct Memory Access DirectSound DirectWrite DirectX Drift-Compensation with Anchor
E — Ethernet, Encryption, Email
F — Firewall, Firmware, File
Fab Face Time Factor fakebook Fall Over Fall Through Fandango on Core FAQ List FAQL Farming Fascist Fast Fourier Transform File Allocation Table File Allocation Table 12 File Allocation Table 16 File Allocation Table 32 Faulty FD Leak Fear and Loathing Forward Error Correction Federal Information Processing Standards Feep Feeper Feeping Creature Feeping Creaturism Feetch Feetch Fence Fencepost Error Fepped Out fetch Fetch-API Field-Effect Transistor Feature Feature Creature Feature Shock Featurectomy FidoNet Field Circus Field-Programmable Gate Array Field Servoid First In, First Out Fight-O-Net File Attach File Encryption Key File Request FileSystem File Transfer Protocol Filk Film at 11 Filter Finish Finagle's Law Fine Finite-State Machine Finger Finger-Pointing Syndrome Firebottle Firefighting Firewall Firewall Code Firewall Machine Fireworks Mode Firmware Firmy Fish FISH Queue Fix Flag Flag Day Flaky Flamage Flame Flame Bait Flame On Flame War Flamer Flap Flarp Flash Flat Flat-ASCII Flat-File Flatten Flavor Flavorful Flip-Flop Flippy Floating Point 16 Float32 Float64 Flowchart Flower Key Flush Flux Flyspeck 3 Flytrap FOAF FOD Fold Case Followup Foo Foobar Fool Fool File, the Foonly Footprint For Free For the Rest of Us Fora Foreground Forked Forms Fortrash Fortune Cookie Forum Fossil Four-Color Glossies Fourier Transform Fourth Extended File System Floating Point 16 Floating Point 32 Fully Qualified Domain Name Fragile Fraud Detection Fred FredNet Freeware Freeze Frequency Frequency Modulation Frequency-Hopping Spread Spectrum Fried Friode Fritterware Frob Frobnicate Frobnitz Frog Front End Frotz Frotzed Frowney Fry Fiber to the Cabinet Fiber to the Home Function Functional Programming FUBAR FUD FUD Wars Fudge Fudge Factor Fuel Up Fuggly Funky Funny Money Fuzzball
G — GPU, Gbps, Gigabyte
H — HTML, HTTP, Hard Drive
I — IP, ISP, IoT
J — Java, JSON, JavaScript
K — Kernel, Kubernetes, Kilobyte
L — LAN, Linux, Load Balancer
M — Malware, Modem, Machine Learning
N — Network, Node, NTP
O — OS, Opcode, Open Source
P — Processor, Protocol, Packet
Q — QoS, Queue, QWERTY
R — RAM, Router, RAID
S — Server, Software, SEO
S/N Ratio Sacred Saga Sagan SAIL Salescritter Salsman Salt Mines Salt Substrate Same-Day Service Sandbender Sandbox Sanity Check Saturday Night Special Say Science-Fiction Fandom Scram Switch Scratch Scratch Monkey Screw Screwage Scribble Scrog Scrool Scrozzle SCSI Search-and-Destroy Mode Second-System Effect Secondary Damage Security Through Obscurity SED Segfault Seggie Segment Segmentation Fault SegV Self-Reference Selvage Semi Semi-Infinite Senior bit SEO: Search Engine Optimization Server SEX Sex Changer Shareware Shelfware Shell Shell Out Shift Left (or Right) Logical Shitogram Short Card Shotgun Debugging Showstopper Shriek Shub-Internet Sidecar Sig Block Sig Quote Signal-to-Noise Ratio Signatures and Authentication Silicon Silicon Foundry Silly Walk Silo Silver Book Since Time T Equals Minus Infinity Site Sitename Skrog Skulker Slap on the Side Slash Sleep Slim Slop Slopsucker Slurp Smart Smart Terminal Smash Case Smash the Stack Smiley Smoke Test Smoking Clover SMOP SNAFU Principle Snail Snail-Mail Snap Snarf Snarf & Barf Snark Sneakernet Sniff Snivitz SO SOAP Social Science Number Soft Boot Softcopy Software Bloat Software Rot Softwarily Softy Some Random X Sorcerer's Apprentice Mode SOS Source of All Good bits Space-Cadet Keyboard SPACEWAR Spaghetti Code Spaghetti Inheritance Spam Special-Case Speedometer Spell Spiffy Spin SPL Splat Sponge Spooge Spool SSH Stack Stack Puke Stale Pointer Bug State Steam-Powered Stiffy Stir-Fried Random Stomp On Stone Age Stoppage Store Stroke Structured Query Language Strudel Stubroutine Studlycaps Stunning Stupid-sort Subshell Sucking Mud Sufficiently Small Suit Suitable Win Suitably Small Sun-Stools Sunspots Superprogrammer Superuser Support Suzie COBOL Swab Swap Swap Space Swapped In Swapped Out Swizzle Sync Syntactic Sugar Sys-Frog SysAdmin SysOp System System Mangler Systems Jock SysVile
T — TCP/IP, Token, Thread
U — USB, URL, Unix
V — VPN, VR, Virus
W — Wi‑Fi, Web, Wireless LAN
X — XML, XOR
Y — Y2K, YouTube
Z — Zero Day, Zip