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When your computer has too many frags, it needs them taken away. This is done by a miracle of technology called a "Defragger."
  technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

An irreverent dictionary of computing terms


Dec. 9, 2001


By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2001, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2001, The Post Standard

   Do you find yourself wishing you could banish jargon from the world of computers?
   Your wish is my command line. Here's an unofficial and irreverent translation of some of the computer terminology you hear every day.
   Hard drive. Of course it's hard. It's made out of metal and plastic. (What do they think we are, dumdums?)
   I wish I had a better term, but I don't. Some people call a hard drive a "hard disk," but that doesn't help at all. The hard drive or hard disk is the metal and plastic object inside your computer that stores everything. Hard drives are fragile. Don't jiggle the computer while it's turned on, and don't confuse a hard drive with item No. 2.
   Floppy disk. Maybe the folks who named a hard piece of metal and plastic a "hard drive" thought they'd play a joke on us by calling another hard piece of metal and plastic a "floppy disk." A floppy disk isn't any more floppy than your average flagpole.
    So why is it called a "floppy disk"? Eons ago, back before anybody had ever heard of instant messages -- umm, see below -- floppy disks were big and floppy. They're now small and stiff. Which goes to show that names last forever, even if they're dumb, stupid and inaccurate.
   Modem. Every home computer that gets on the Internet through a phone connection does it through a modem. The name is supposed to mean "MOdulate-DEModulate," as if that meant something to us humans. Engineers with nothing better to do gave us that name in hopes that we would not notice that modems never seem to work right.
    "Modulate" means -- oh, it doesn't matter. If I had to explain it, which I wish I didn't, I'd say it means sticking one kind of signal on top of another. "Demodulate" means undoing all that "modulate" stuff. (Now THAT was easy.)
   Modems put chirps and tweets onto the phone line the way fax machines do. (Every working adult has taken at least one phone call from a fax machine, so we all know what these chirps and tweets sound like. They sound like ... don't make me say this! ... chirps and tweets.)
   These sounds, these Cs and Ts, carry computer data by some sort of magic that only six people worldwide understand. These experts are so important that they're never allowed to go on vacation at the same time.
   Monitor. What are you supposed to be "monitoring" with your monitor? What miscreant made up this term? A computer monitor is just a screen that shows you what the computer wants you to see. If you call it the "display screen" people in all lands will be happy, and you'll help make the world safe for demography. (OK, OK. These puns hurt me as much as they hurt you. It's called a "monitor" because the first computers had to be monitored all the time. That's how ornery they were.)
   Reboot. Don't tell me it means to put your winter shoes back on. You give something "the boot" to get it going. Computers constantly faint from overwork and confusion and need to be booted again. (No, not with your foot, silly.) You boot them again by doing something special, as explained next.
   Shut Down. When the computer has to be rebooted, you do the obvious thing. You click the Start button. (What do you mean, it's not the obvious thing? What are you, a pinko or something?)
   Clicking the Start button leads to the Shut Down menu. That leads to something called "Restart." Notice that this function is never called what it really is, "Whacking the Computer Upside the Head" (also called "Reboot"), because no one wants you to think that computers misbehave and need remedial attention.
   Defrag. When your computer has too many frags, it needs them taken away. This is done by a miracle of technology called a "Defragger." The defragger runs all night long and then tells you in the morning that it has a headache and couldn't finish what it was doing. Through the parallel miracle of consistency, it will do the same thing the next time it runs.
   Instant Message. Federal law requires all homework to be done by means of Instant Messages. All students know this intuitively, but parents don't have a clue. Sometimes Instant Messages can be annoying. When that happens, you should reply to all of them with the following phrase: "I love the 100 free hours AOL gave me this month." Only a psychiatrist knows what that actually means.
   Ink-jet printer. A beige object that accepts money in the form of ink cartridges and spits out rectangular IOUs in return. These devices got their name from the cost of jet fuel, which is only slightly higher than the cost of colored ink.
   Forward. A new provision of the Constitution requires every e-mail message to be forwarded 137 times to your sister-in-law before it reaches you. Furthermore, every time it is forwarded it must get proportionately longer.
   A subsection of the new law forbids you from deleting forwarded messages, especially if they are from Walt Disney or Bill Gates. You must forward them to 137 others that same day.