Short and sharp this month, a basic dash of terms for you, more next month.
Apple Desktop Bus [ADB] port
Take a look at the back of your Mac and you'll see this is a round socket for connecting your mouse, keyboard and other third party input devices.
Bad Sectors
Parts of your internal/external hard drive that are corrupt and can't hold data reliably. You get a message similar to 'bad sectors were found on this disk' from most disk repair applications. Regular scanning and good hard drive house-keeping will help reduce the amount of bad sectors developing.
Bomb
When an application or system routine has stopped or frozen resulting in a crash. You'll get a warning in an alert box with a bomb icon on the left telling you what's happened. If this happens restart the Mac and run disk first aid. Check out our healthy Mac's section and Mac basics for more help on these matters.
Boot-up
This is the starting-up of your Mac. Bootable disk is another term for a disk that has a system folder that will 'boot' your Mac up. Bootable disks be they CD, Zip/Jazz or floppy are great for repairing your hard drive as you can start up your Mac off another disk other than your internal.
Burn software
Term given to cutting, writing or saving your work/applications to a CD ROM disk from a CD writer drive.
Chooser
Normally stored in your Apple menu. With this you can switch AppleTalk on and select printers.
Clipboard
Can be found in your System Folder. When you copy a picture or text piece [command C] it will be stored in your Macs RAM and you can paste the pic/text [command V] into the scrapbook or another application.
Drag 'n' Drop
Opening a file/document by 'dropping' it on an applications Icon. A great time saving feature introduced from System 7 upward.
Find File
Now Sherlock in OS 8x is an excellent feature that not only can search your hard drive but the internet. By pressing Command F you'll be able to access Sherlock.
Kilobyte [K]
1,024 single bytes of data. An example of this would be a ClarisWorks file saved to disk might be about 28k.
Megabyte [MB]
1,024 Kilobytes or one million single bytes of data. An example of this would be - 'my computer has 104MB of RAM. Gigabyte is 1,024 megabytes of data. Hard drives are now being measured in Gigabytes in all modern computers. Example would be a 4Gig [GB] hard drive.
Optical Disk
High capacity non magnetic storage devices. Normally external removable media disks.
