# Standard Computer Terms

Application - A solution you create with filePro to solve a business problem. Examples of applications are: accounting, payroll, inventory control, medical office system etc. Applications usually consist of more that one filePro file joined by lookups and other functions to make the files more useful.

ASCII - American Society for Computer Information Interchange.

ASCII character set - A set of characters, 1 character per unique byte, i.e., 256 characters can be represented by one byte (8 bits in all the various combinations of 1's and 0's.).

Backup - Safety copy of data and/or programs.

Batch File - A file (DOS) whose text can be read by DOS as instructions and then executed. Batch files can be called from filePro menu options or run from the command line.

Batch Processing - Processing groups of selected records such as: posting data from invoice file to a summary file, archiving and purging inactive accounts, performing mass recalculations.

Binary - two states, off and on, 1 and 0.

bit - 1 Binary digit, a bit can either be on or off, either a 1 or a 0.

byte - 8 bits in a group. There are 256 combinations of 1's and 0's in a byte.

character - 1 byte. 256 characters can be defined with 1 byte.

Database - A collection of related information organized in files, records and fields. Separate files may share common information for the purpose of connecting records between files (see filePro term "lookup").

Disk - Long term storage system for programs and data include hard disks (magnetic), optical disks (laser). The capacity in characters of these devices is expressed in gigabytes (or megabytes [older drives]). Disks are also called drives (hard drive, compact disk drive). Nobody seems to know why.

Flat ASCII files are (by convention) comprised of only the first 128 characters that one byte can provide, i.e., the combinations of 1's and 0's that the first 7 bits can make up. Of these, only the printable or human readable characters are normally found in a flat ASCII file (combinations 32 to 128). However, some of the lower combinations, such as carriage returns and line-feeds are also present.

Adding the 8th bit produces characters 129 through 255. These are sometimes called the high ASCII set (above 128). They are "off the keyboard," meaning you can not generate them from the keyboard. FilePro is capable of storing these high characters, but there is almost no reason to ever do so in a text database. The upper ASCII characters are displayed as symbols, pictures, etc. In fact, different "symbol sets" can be overlaid on the higher ASCII set to produce different language characters, and special characters. If you see one of these funny characters in your data... there is most likely a problem and your data has been corrupted somehow. Occasionally though, you will see some graphic character(s) representing carriage returns, line-feeds and combinations (new lines) when you pull a structured file into a "non-filePro" file format. This is normal, and these characters do not mean the data is corrupted.

gigabyte - 1024 megabytes.

GUI - The abbreviation for Graphical User Interface. The term came into existence because the first interactive user interfaces to computers were not graphical; they were text-and-keyboard oriented and usually consisted of commands you had to remember and computer responses that were brief.

kilobyte - 1024 bytes

megabyte - 1024 kilobytes

ODBC - Abbreviation for Open Database Connectivity. ODBC is Microsoft's strategic interface for accessing data in a heterogeneous environment of relational and non-relational database management systems.

RAM - Random Access Memory. This is the memory in which the computer stores programs and data temporarily while you use them. It retrieves these programs and data from your disk storage.