OFFICE ASSISTANTS: Supposedly helpful aids supporting Microsoft Office, from about 1997 through 2005.  These include some of the icons shown below, including Clippy, PowerPup, Office Logo (jigsaw-like), Dot (a shape and color shifting smiley-faced ball), Hoverbot (a robot), Mother Nature (a globe), Scribble (a cat),  and The Genius (similar to Einstein).  Not shown are Will (a Shakespeare like character, Kairu the Dolphin and Monkey King (for multilingual packs) and Rover (which helped users navigate through Microsoft Bob).  Macintosh used an assistant named Max, in the shape of a Macintosh Plush.  [These would make great Trivial Pursuit answers, wouldn’t they!]

OFFICE: Refers to Microsoft Office, a business productivity “suite” of interrelated programs which was introduced in 1989 for Mac and 1990 for Windows (bet you didn’t know that).  Office comes in several versions, but includes such programs as Word, Excel, Access, Outlook & Powerpoint.  Before the introduction of Office, because the programs didn’t work together, you had to create a graphic in a separate program like Harvard Graphics, or example, then import the graphic into Word and configure and format it in that program.  Now, all of the programs work together seamlessly.  It really was a big deal! Predecessors to Office were Word Perfect and WordStar.

OFFICE 365: Microsoft’s 2011 rebranding of BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite) which unifies MS Office, Sharepoint Online, Exchange on line and Lync online onto a cloud platform available for a set monthly fee.  It can be useful for small businesses that want to act like a larger business, because it fully synchronizes Outlook (you’ll see the same Outlook files whether you’re working on your office PC, your laptop while on the road, your iPad at home), shares calendars and contacts, retrieves voice mail messages as SMS on your cell phone and allows remote document management and file sharing.

OEM: Original Equipment Manufacturer.  Actually, this term refers to a company (e.g. Dell, HP) that acquires components or products from others (e.g. Intel, Microsoft) and incorporates it into a product under its own brand name.

OLED: Stands for “Organic Light-Emitting Diode”.  See, LED.  Also, AMOLED, Active Matrix OLED, for an exceedingly bright screen with high-intensity color, as used on the Samsung Impression, the first cell phone to use this technology.  See SCREENS.

OLEOPHOBIC: Oil and grease resistant, as in the screen of the iPad.  Better than merely hydrophobic, or water resistant.

OLTP: Stands for Online Transaction Processing.

ONE LAPTOP PER CHILD (OLPC): There are actually two organizations at work here to fulfill a mission to deliver laptops to children in less-developed countries.  Both were started in about 2006.  The first is a project of the Miami-based One Laptop per Child Association, Inc., a U.S. non-profit organization set up to create and distribute an affordable computer for use in the developing countries.  It was originally funded by members such as Google, AMD, Red Hat and eBay, among others.  The second, One Laptop Per Child Foundation, is a Cambridge-based non-profit foundation led by Nicholas Negroponte, which focuses on fund raising and the development of future learning technologies for the program. The overall mission has been to design, manufacture and distribute inexpensive but rugged laptop computers (about 1.6 million so far) having only two cables, a Linux O/S and solid state drives (SSDs) to  less-developed countries such as Uruguay, Rowanda, Haiti and Mongolia.  The theory is that if each of the (2 billion) children in the developing world had his or her computer, the school day would be extended from just a few hours to 12 - 14 hours a day.

ONENOTE: Like EVERNOTE, a note-taking app which lets you quickly organize and connect many bits of information — and share them with others who might also need access to that data, in the cloud. Both paid and free versions.  Because OneNote is from Microsoft, it is better suited toward Office applications, where the import and export commands are in the File menu, while Evernote's default format (.enex), single or multiple HTML webpages (.html), or a Web archive (.mht) are used to import and export.

ONION ROUTER: A technique for anonymous surfing and communication over the Internet.  This is accomplished by encrypting messages within messages repeatedly, such that at each point along the transmission path, that router encrypts the forwarded communication in an unpredictable path while eliminating traces of all of the previous paths.  One of the most popular ORs is TOR, free open-source software.

ONTOLOGY: A philosophical concept applied to computer science, information science, artificial intelligence, biometrics and other sciences.  It is a formal representation of a set of concepts within a “domain” (central concept) and the categorical relationships between those concepts.  It is used to both define the domain and to reason about its properties. Common components of ontologies include classes, sets, attributes, relations, functions, restrictions, rules, axioms and events.  An example of an ontology would be the categorization of living things in biology by category, genus, etc.  In artificial intelligence, the computational models that enable automated reasoning use ontologies to relate the artificial world to the real one.

OOP: Stands for Object Oriented Programming, a programming language model organized around “objects” rather than “actions” and data rather than logic. The first step in OOP is to identify all the objects you want to manipulate and how they relate to each other, an exercise known as data modeling.  Next is to generalize the object into a class.  After defining the kind of data the class contains, one must define any logic sequences (known as methods) that can manipulate it.  Finally, objects communicat using well-defined interfaces called messages. OOP languages include Java, Python, C++, Visual Basic, .NET and Ruby.  Historically, Simula was the first OOP language.

OOXML: Stands for “Office Open XML”, a format from Microsoft which purports to allow users support for Open Document Format (“ODF”) but doesn’t really give users the ability to use code to reconfigure Office programs.

OPAL: A new standard for hardware-based full drive encryption (“FDE”).

OPEN FLOW PROTOCOL:  A protocol that implements SDN , describing how a controller communicates with other network devices.  By reducing the three “planes” of networking equipment (management, control & forwarding), each of which has different manufacturer interfaces, into a single software management controller, a system administrator can control the network with far more efficiency and simplicity, if this protocol catches on.

OPEN SOURCE: Also, Open Standard.  Software program in which the original source code is available to the general public for use and/or modification from its original design free of charge.

OPTION KEY: A key on the Apple keyboard which has essentially the same function as the IBM PC “ALT” key, that is, as a shortcut to various menu options when it is depressed and held along with another key.

ORGANIC: A word which, when used with respect to Internet searches, means “unpaid” search results, as opposed to “advertised” results.  See also, viral.

OS (or O/S): Stands for your “Operating System”.  This is the computer software (instructions) that turn your computer from a putty-colored paperweight into a “real” computer, ready to accept your commands.  Most residential computers use some version of the Microsoft Windows OS (XP, Vista, ‘98, ‘95, NT etc.).  Mac uses its own OS (OS X right now).  And there are others (e.g. UNIX, VMS, VAX, Linux).  Software that is used after the OS is loaded are commonly referred to as “Application Software”, “Apps”, or simply “Programs” because this type of software is used, through the OS, so that your computer can “apply” itself to various tasks (word processing [“MS Word”], keeping a checkbook [“Quicken”] or drawing a picture [“Paint”], etc.).

OSI MODEL: The Open System Interconnection Reference Model, as developed by the ISO.  This model breaks down the various aspects of a computer network into seven layers, each of which envelopes the layers beneath it.  The seven layers are:  Physical (the hardware and cable), Data Link (packet size, transmission, error detection, etc.), Network (the interconnection of more than one network, even different types of network), Transport (addresses, connections, nodes, packets and other communications between computer networks), Session (establishing and maintaining a session for data transmission), Presentation (compression, encryption and other data conversion at each end of the transmission) and Application (techniques that application programs use to communicate with the network). [To remember this, you can use the menomic “All People Seem To Need Data Processing.”

OSLO: See, software modeling.

OSP: Outside Plant Cable. Refers to all physical cable and supporting infrastructure between the broadcaster’s (telephone, cable, etc.) switching facility and the customer’s demarc.  It is, of course, usually run outside between buildings.

OUTPUT: The result of processing the data input to a computer.  Output can be in various formats (e.g. on screen, printed, to disk).

OUTSIDE IN: A document management middleware app from Oracle, most frequently encountered as part of desktop scanner software like NewSoft.

OVERCLOCKING:  Popular with older (-286, -386, -486) computer chips.  Involves any adjustment made to the computer to make its CPU run at a higher clock frequency than intended by the original manufacturers.  Typically involves replacing the crystal in the clock generation circuitry with a higher  frequency one or changing jumper settings or software.  Not ordinarily very reliable, because quite often it results in overheating or partial or complete hardware failure over time.

OVERTURE: Previously, GoTo.  A search engine powered by Inktomi, which only returns one URL per domain in its search results.

CLICK TO SHARE THIS PAGE

CLICK THE FIRST LETTER OF YOUR ACRONYM OR TERM TO SEARCH GLOSSARY:

© Computer Coach.  All written materials are the sole property of Computer Coach (unless otherwise attributed) and no part of this website may be used in any format without the express written permission of Computer Coach.