"A little learning is a dangerous thing;
drink deep or taste not the Pierian spring.
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
--Alexander Pope"
The proposition behind this glossary is simple: computers should be easy to use and maintain but they aren't. A false assumption behind most deployments of networked computing environments is that end-users (i.e., people who use their computers to do things other than write computer programs) don't need to know the details of how their computer works. While it is true that you don't need to know how your computer really works (i.e., understand the machine code that moves around the central processing unit), you need a functional model of what your computer is doing at any given moment and (in the case of a networked computing environment), where that activity is taking place. Without such a model, and its accompanying technical vocabulary, when unexpected things happen (and they almost always do) or when you want to extend your present abilities, you are at the mercy of technical people who very often will simply solve your immediate problem without explaining what it is they did, which in turn usually adds more complexity to an already baffling environment.
Imagine that you are in charge of a whole staff of people who will assist you in doing your work. Imagine that your work is in the wholesale business, which involves receiving stuff from manufacturers, and in turn shipping stuff out to retailers. In order to do this sort of work, you need to send your staff to various places to arrange to pick up and deliver items. They need different equipment to pick up different types of things, and they need to go to different places to use this equipment. You and your staff need to speak a common vocabulary: in order to tell them what to do, they need to be able to understand your directions. Thus, you might say:
"Take the blue pickup truck, go down to Louie's on 2nd avenue, and pick up up six dozen cases of peanut butter."
"I'm expecting a FedEx shipment from some firm in California that should contain the hamburger rolls we owe McDonald's."In order for meaningful work to take place, everyone must agree on a shared vocabulary that will enable them to speak efficiently and understand the content of their statements, without stumbling over the syntax and the meaning of particular words.
This glossary then is designed to help you and your colleagues arrive at such a shared vocabulary and syntax with respect to your computers, so that you can say to one another:
"I ftped into the Bodleian library and downloaded a bunch of quite nicely marked-up manuscripts."In order to develop a functional model of your computing environment, you need to first understand that you are connected to two different networks via the wires in your office: Netware and the Internet. It sends out signals across a network that is structured like this:
or
"I put the document up on the fileserver in the departmental folder; should I send it to you as an attachment as well"
| Macintosh Software Used | Windows Software Used | |
| Netware Clients | ||
| logging in | chooser | from f: login |
| file servers | chooser | file manager |
| choosing printers | chooser | print manager |
| network databases | sirsi client | sirsi client |
| Internet Clients | ||
| eudora/telnet | eudora/winqvt | |
| world wide web | netscape | netscape |
| library on-line catalog | sirsi/telnet/netscape | sirsi/winqvt/netscape |
| networked databases | sirsi/telnet/netscape | sirsi/winqvt/netscape |