| E & OE |
Acronym for Errors and Omissions Excepted and is
quite often found at the bottom of advertisements and brochures. In other words anything
you read above could be wrong and no liability is made by the vendor for a product or
service as advertised. |
| E-MAIL
(pronounced
"E-mail") |
Acronym for Electronic
Mail. |
| ECP
(pronounced
"E-C-P") |
Acronym for Extended Capabilities Port. |
| ECS CHIPSET
(pronounced
"E-C-S chipset") |
The name given to the Amiga's custom graphics
chips, consisting of Agnus, (but only 8372 or later Agnus chip capable of 1Mb or more of
Chip RAM and Super hi-res mode), Denise and Paula chips as found in the A500+, A600, &
A3000, although many have upgraded older machines with this chipset. |
| EDITORS |
Programs that let you create and modify text
files. The Amiga typically provides three text editors; ED, MEMACS and EDIT, while many
others are available in PD Libraries. |
| EDUCATIONAL
GAMES |
A style of game which aims to educate the player
as part of the game, and in so doing make the learning experience fun and more memorable.
They are particularly suitable for slow learners as the repetitive nature of these games
ensures an adequate level of understanding before moving on to more complex levels.
However, there is a lot of garbage out there that claims to be great educational games, so
check out the reviews before buying. |
| EEMS |
Acronym for Enhanced Expanded Memory Specification |
| EGS
(pronounced
"E-G-S") |
Acronym for Enhanced
Graphics System. |
| EHB
(pronounced
"E-H-B") |
Acronym for Extra
Half Brite. |
| ELECTRONIC MAIL
(abbreviation "e-mail") |
A method of sending mail to elecronic post
boxes, where people can log-on and leave messages for one another using a modem and a
personal computer. In fact this facility is also provided to most users of BBS's. When you
log on you are advised of any mail waiting, and you have the opportunity to read it then
before continuing or wait until later. |
| EM |
The unit of measurement for type width, usually
defined as the horizontal distance equal to the point size of the font. |
| EM SPACE |
A space equal to the point size of the font
being used. |
| EMPLANT |
A multi-platform Macintosh and MS-DOS emulator
for the Amiga developed by Jim Drew. It is available in a number of different
configurations and can fully multi-task against the Amiga's operating system. On an A3000
it is equivalent to a Mac IIci, or a Quadra 700 on an A4000. |
| EMS |
Acronym for Expanded Memory Specification. |
| EMULATOR |
Hardware or software that can change your Amiga
into a different computer and run programs designed for that computer. There are numerous
emulators for the Amiga ranging from Apple Macintosh and MS-DOS to the Spectrum. |
| ENCAPSULATED POSTSCRIPT (acronym
"EPS") |
An extension of the Adobe PostScript format to
include pictures and other graphics ready for printing. |
| EN |
The unit of measurement for type width as one
half the horizontal width of an "EM" (i.e. one half the point size). |
| EN SPACE |
A space equal to the height of an "EM" and the width of an "EN" (i.e. one
half the width of the point size). |
| ENCODER |
The component of video systems that receives
picture information and ties it to the regular frequencies of a clock oscillator, where
the intervals between ticks of the clock describe the pulse points for an electronic
waveform that can be recorded or transmitted via radio waves. |
| ENHANCED EXPANDED MEMORY SPECIFICATION
(acronym "EEMS") |
Some software developers and hardware
manufacturers believed that the EMS standard
was somewhat lacking and led to a downgrade in performance, so a competitive standard was
adopted by AST, Quadram and Ashton-Tate. The new standard provided up to 512 pages each of
16K each (the same as EMS), but up to 64 pages could be selected at any one time, instead
of only 4 pages for EMS, although in the real world however 16 pages was about the limit.
EEMS had the advantage that it gave larger window sizes and multi-tasking support. (See
also EMS and LIM EMS
4.0). |
| ENHANCED GRAPHICS SYSTEM
(acronym "EGS") |
A set of libraries similar to the normal Amiga
libraries, but written and maintained by Viona Developments. They are not a replacement
for either the intuition.library or graphics.library, but merely an extension to the
existing operating system. The EGS libraries are in the public domain and are freely
available to the general public, but the main idea is that any third-party manufacturers,
such as GVP, are able to license the software, which entails having a driver written by
Viona for their particular card. This means that software written for one EGS compatible
card will work on any other EGS compatible card. Currently supported graphics cards are
the EGS 110/24, EGS-28/24 Spectrum, Piccolo, Rainbow II, Retina and others. |
|
ENHANCED PARALLEL PORT (acronym "EPP") |
A parallel port standard that supports bi-directional communication between the PC and attached non-printer devices and is
about 10 times faster than the older Centronics standard.
|
|
EPP (pronounced "E-P-P")
|
Acronym for ENHANCED PARALLEL PORT.
|
|
EPS (pronounced "E-P-S")
|
Acronym for Encapsulated PostScript.
|
|
ETHERNET (pronounced "ether-net")
|
A Local Area Network system developed by Xerox Corporation, that allows
connected devices to transmit randomly without any control over access to the connecting medium. If more than one device
attempts to transmit data at the same time, both devices wait for different periods before attempting to re-transmit data.
|
| EXABYTE (abbreviation "EB" |
1,152,921,504,606,846,976 (260) bytes to be precise, but frequently used to mean roughly a million million million bytes
(1018), or 1024 Petabytes. The unambiguous name 'Exbibyte' can be used for the true binary value.
|
| EXBIBYTE (abbreviation "XiB" |
1,152,921,504,606,846,976 (260) bytes, and is the unambiguous name for 'Exabyte to denote the true
binary value.
|
| EXEC |
Routines of the Operating System which control
multi-tasking,input/output and interrupt management. |
| EXPANDED MEMORY SPECIFICATION
(acronym
"EMS") |
When the original 8088
based computers were released, 640K was considered to be more than enough memory, but it
was not long before it was found to be a major constraint. When the 80286 was released, it had the potential of being able to
address 16Mb of memory, but unfortunately the operating system (MS-DOS), and most
applications had been written to run within the 640K limitations. So memory expansion
boards appeared which utilised bank switching
but different developers implemented them in different ways and no-one could agree on how
they should be used. The breakthrough came when Intel, Lotus & Microsoft got together
to produce an expanded memory specification for using these boards. The standard provided
for 512 pages of 16K each, giving a total accessible memory of 8Mb, but only four of these
pages could be accessed at any one time. When the 80386
was released, yet another memory management method, known as extended
memory specification, was introduced to use the memory above 1Mb. However, many games
prefer to use expanded memory rather than extended memory and may not work if the latter
has been specified by the startup files. See also EEMS). |
| EXPERT SYSTEM |
A computer system where many of the rules of operation and procedure are clearly defined to the system, which enables personnel
to perform tasks more complex than their skill set would normally allow them, and has been implemented into areas such as
insurance and banking etc. Where there is no rule or a conflict of information arises, the system will request that a
supervisor or person with a higher skill set be consulted. There is no attempt by the system to learn from experience or
evolve new rules dynamically as happens in Artificial Intelligence systems.
|
|
EXPRESSION
|
A written statement that describes a set of variables,fields or constants combined with arithmetic, relational or logical
operators.
|
|
EXTENDED MEMORY (acronym "XMS")
|
The memory above 1Mb on an MS-DOS PC and accessed using XMS as opposed to EMS.
It was common on 80386 and 80486 based machines, which
often resulted in problems for many games that wanted to use extended memory instead. Memory can be used in either way
depending on the contents of the startup files.
|
|
EXTENDED CAPABILITIES PORT (acronym "ECP")
|
A parallel-port standard that supports bi-directional communication between the PC and attached devices (such as a printer),
and is about 10 times faster than the older Centronics standard.
|
|
EXTRA HALF BRITE (acronym "EHB")
|
This mode takes the existing 32 colour palette on machines fitted with Fat Agnus or later and reproduces them with half
luminance to give a total of 64 colours. The second half of the palette is dependant on the first half and cannot be changed
independantly.
|