Information Science Technical Terms
WORM
Worms are close cousins to viruses and Trojan Horses. Unlike viruses, they don't infect other programs. They
make many copies of themselves in memory, which effectively consumes all your memory. This leaves no memory
to run you regular programs. Your PC may behave very erratically, or just grind to a halt.
Some worms get into the computer's e-mail list and e-mail themselves to everyone on your e-mail list without your
knowledge.
HTML
Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) is the language that is written to format web pages on Servers so that
Browsers can display them. Click "View" and then "Source" or "Source Code" to see the HTML code used
to create the page you are viewing.
DOMAIN NAME
This is a unique name, formed with letters and numbers, that points to the actual numerical Internet address which
locates a particular computer connected to the Internet. For instance, The Yahoo domain name points to the Internet
Protocol (IP) address 66.218.71.198.
So when you enter www.yahoo.com in your browser and click go, a special server called a domain name server intercepts
and directs your request to the server located at address 66.218.71.198. USSVI's Domain Name is ussvi.org for
example.
BROWSER
A browser is software on a computer used to request and display web pages (a web page is the site you are viewing such
as www.barthworks.com/Non Fiction). An example of a page is www.barthworks.com which is sent to a user's computer from a
Server. Examples of Browsers are:
- Internet Explorer (IE)
- Firefox, Opera
- Safari
When you use your browser to call up www.barthworks.com, for example, you are reading a server that the author of page
created or modified and sent to that server. When you call up a page, that page is placed in your computers memory.
The pages you have brought into your computer are retained in memory unless you clear your page name history
periodically. This is done in both IE and Firefox under options/Internet options.
DRIVER
A driver is a special type of software. Whenever your PC needs to connect to and control a peripheral device like
a printer or scanner, the driver software that interfaces between your computer and the device is required.
So what do you do if you need a driver? Try going to the hardware manufacturer's website and looking for a link to
drivers. There should be a way to download the driver you need.
DYNAMIC LINK LIBRARY
A dynamic link library (DLL) consists of small programs that is used for a specific purpose by the main program
that calls it. Windows programs like Word and Excel call and use many DLL files.
Unlike most programs, that link and compile all the program elements they need before they begin executing, DLLs are only
loaded and used as they are needed. This feature saves random access memory (RAM) space, which is a valuable resource.
A DLL file usually has a filetype of ".dll".