ADSL: (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line) - A method for moving data over regular telephone lines that is much faster than a regular telephone connection. A common configuration of ADSL would allow a subscriber to download at speeds of up to 1.544 megabits per second, and upload at speeds of up to 128 kilobits per second.

Anonymous FTP: To connect to an FTP server without providing a personal login ID and password. Often permitted by large host computers who are willing to openly share some of their system files to outside users who otherwise would not be able to log in.

Applet: A small Java program that can be placed (embedded) in an HTML page. Applets differ from full-fledged Java applications in that they are not allowed to access files and serial devices (modems, printers, etc.) on the local computer, and are prohibited from communicating with other computers across a network.

Archie: An early Internet search tool not used much since the advent of the Web Browser in 1994. It is an archive of filenames maintained at Internet FTP sites.

ARPANet: (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) - The precursor to the Internet. It was developed in the late 60's by the US Department of Defense as an experiment in wide-area networking that would survive a nuclear war.

ASCII: (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) - The world-wide standard of code numbers used by computers to represent all the upper- and lower-case Latin letters, numbers, and punctuation. There are 128 standard ASCII codes, each of which can be represented by a 7-digit binary number, 0000000 through 1111111.

AU: A common audio file format for UNIX systems (.au).

AVI: (Audio/Video Interleaved) - A common video file format (.avi). Video quality can be good at smaller resolutions, but files tend to be large.