Techie Terms

Bug | A bug is something that doesn’t work right. 

Interesting historical note: US Navy Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, the intellectual guiding force behind the COBOL programming language and one of the pioneers in the history of computing, told the story of a moth being found in a relay of an ancient Mark II computer. 

Cloud | A marketing term for the internet. 

Cloud Storage | You’re just sticking your data on some company’s computers. Put a file in Microsoft OneDrive, and it goes onto one of Microsoft’s computer. Put it in Google Drive, and it goes to Google’s storage in the sky. Move it to Dropbox, and it’s sitting on a Dropbox server.

Download | If you take something off the internet and put it on your computer.

Driver | A program programmed to support specific pieces of hardware to work with the operating system. The driver acts like a translator that enables Windows to ask your hardware to do what it wants.

Froze | If the program just sits there and you can’t get it to do anything, no matter how you click your mouse or poke the screen, you can say that it froze, 

Install | When you place an app or a program on your computer and set it up so that you can use it,

Launch | When you start a program.

Mobile Hotspots | A mobile hotspot connects your laptop or mobile device to a cellular network. 

Network | When you connect computers and devices to each other, you network them. The network can be wired, using cables; wireless, often called Wi-Fi.

Upload | When you send something from your computer to the internet.