Acronyms & Jargon…A Resource For Those Who Aren’t as Infatuated as The World of Tech is.

Acronyms & Tech Jargon…

A Resource to help those that’s aren’t hip to some of the latest tech acronyms

This is a Resource for those who aren’t as infatuated as the world of tech tends to be with their over usage of acronyms.

Hey it’s OK, me neither. Most of the reason I’m putting this page up is because I’m a normal human that doesn’t tend to speak in only acronyms and I wanted to have something I could refer back to when I need a refresher. I thought other people would also find it a useful resource. So enjoy! 🙂

Some Definitions before the Definitions

I’d say to you, you’re right, they USUALLY are…except when a letter stands for the acronym itself…Whoa! Wait, What?!? (you mind may have just melted if you got caught in that infinite loop with no base case…sorry, nerd humor).

Yup, it’s called a Recursive Acronym (click this for Wikipedia’s more indepth explaination). Now if your reading this page, your more likely to be on the ‘junior’* side of the developer spectrum than the ‘senior’* you may not know what recursion is. That’s ok, it can be a hard concept to get, but in computer terms, it’s a function that calls it self.

(regardless of where you’re at in terms of your career, no one can remember all of these and all engineers should have no regrets about needing to look these up. We’re all human & that’s why I created this page.)

The concept can be hard to grasp at first and you may think the implications of such a thing would result in the Universe collapsing in onto itself. (<--that's a joke, but if you actually thought that, that's ok. I did too at first.(<--that's a joke but if you actually thought that was a possibility, that's ok. I did too at first.(<--that's a jo..."Ahhhl, quick [BREAK], [ESC], [CTRL][C], [CTRL][ALT][DEL], anything that will get us out of this infinite loop...whew....that was scary! I heard the fabric of space-time starting to tear. That could of been bad!

I’ll try to limit the ‘nerd humor’, but I really wouldn’t hold your breath. This sh!t just flows out of me at times (doens’t every body have that problem every once in a while though?) <--ew, that's dirty humor :(, no bueno.

In all seriousness (no not another joke), just know that when you see the type of acronym that refers to itself in the definition, that it was really the creators way of introducing a bit of the ‘nerd humor’ into a name or definition of something. Not too far off from the theme I have going here, so I guess it wan’t a time wasting attempt to be funny. It all ties in. 🙂

For those Junior Level Developers:

A note for those of you that are currently at the junior level:

For one, don’t be discouraged by all this. Yes, it can be overwhelming but it’s important that you know we all get discouraged and it’s important to not let that drag you down. That cycle can be perpetual and is never good. I can especially attest to that.

Second, know that with some persistence, focus and determination (the level of which will determine the time), you will start to have more and more ‘ah ha!’ moments, in which everything starts to click or you finally get an abstract concept.

When that day comes when you learn about recursion and it’s usefulness in certain algorithms and functions, you’ll smile as you reflect to that time you read this initially and say to yourself: “Hey, Brandon was right about that advise, and I get his jokes now. lulz… He’s high-larious. Kudos!”…hey, we all have hopes & dreams. 😉

For All Developers Everyone!

You’ve finally arrived at the meat & potatoes section of the page! Congratulations after bearing though Brandon’s lame duck humor… I think he thinks he’s actually funny :/, oh well… It’s best to just smile, nod and give a half heart’ed chuckle while slowly backing away…you’ll be out of site before he knows it. 😉

Reference Links

Here are some references or other pages that I may have found through out my research into various acronyms. If I thought it was informative & worthy enough, it will be posted below. I’m also always open to new suggestions that you may have to offer to. If you have knowledge of a good find, share that knowledge. The reason I wanted to start this site was to offer a resource of factual, relative and current information in this ‘Mis-Information Age’

Reference Links

acronymfinder.com – This cool site has a searchable database of all sorts of acronyms.

While it’s does have some of the computer and technology related acronyms, because it’s a general purpose and not specific to a certain area or niche, it just provides what each letter stands for in the acronym and does not offer any other information or context. (Keep in mind I’m not, nor is anyone able to search every acronym, so I could be wrong in that general assumption as I only searched acronyms related to the tech field.)

Finally, The Meat & Potatoes!

General Purpose:

RFC (Request For Comments):
IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force):

Computer Acronyms:

OS (Operating System):
DOS (Disk Operating System):
CPU (Central Processing Unit):
GPU (Graphics Processing Unit):
PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect): A local computer bus for attaching hardware devices.
APG (Accelerated Graphics Port): Designed as a high-speed point-to-point channel for attaching a video card to a computer system.
VGA (Video Graphics Array):
SVGA (Super Video Graphics Array):
HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface):
RAM (Random Access Memory):
IP (Internet Protocol):
BIOS (Basic Input Output System):
UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface): Specification that defines a software interface between an Operating System (OS) and the platform firmware. UEFI replaces the BIOS firmware interface originally present in all IBM PC-compatible computers.
DOS (Disk Operating System): Example -MS-DOS=Microsoft Disk Operating System

Networking Based Acronyms:

OSI model (Open Systems Interconnection model): is a conceptual model that characterizes and standardized the communication functions of a telecommunication of computing system without regard to its underlying internal structure and technology. Its goal is the interoperability of diverse communication systems with standard protocols. The model partitions a communications system into abstraction layers. The original version of the model defined 7 layers.Wikipedia: OSI Model
NIC (Network Interface Card):
ISP (Internet Service Provider):
DSL (Digital Subscriber Line):
IMAP (Internet Messaging Access Protocol):
W3C (World Wide Web Consortium): Main international standards organization for the World Wide Web.
UPnP (Universal Plug and Play): A set of networking protocols that permits networked devices, such as personal computers, printers, Internet Gateways, Wi-Fi Access Points and mobile devices to seamlessly discover each other’s presence on the network and establish functional network services for data sharing.
URI (Uniform Resource Identifier): String of characters that unambiguously identifies a particular logical or physical resource. Defined in RFC 3986 and extended upon in W3C’s Web Architecture of the World Wide Web Volume 1.

The generic form of any URI is scheme:[//[user:password@]host[:port]][/]path[?query][#fragment]
URL (Uniform Resource Locator): A reference to web resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. This type of URI begins by stating which protocol should be used to locate and access the physical or logical resource on a network.
cURL (Client URL): Command-line toll for getting or sending files using URL syntax
PPPoE (Point-to-Point Protocol over Ethernet): A network protocol that encapsulates PPP frames inside Ethernet frames. It’s primarily used with DSL as the solution for tunneling packets over the DSL connection to the ISP’s IP network and from there to the rest of the Internet.
HTTP (Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol):
FTP (File Transfer Protocol):
TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol):
LAN (Local Area Network):
WAN (Wide Area Network):
LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol):

Programming Languages & Development Acronyms:

PHP (Recursive Acronym: ‘PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor’):*Side note, the colon (‘PHP:’) after the PHP is the correct way to write out this recursive acronym.
CI (Continuous Integration):
HTML (Hypertext Markup Language):
CSS (Cascading Style Sheets):
DOM (Document Object Model):
JSON (JavaScript Object Notation):
SQL (Structured Query Language):
~~var (Variable):~~

Linux Based Acronyms:

GNU (Recursive Acronym: GNU is Not Unix):
CLI (Command Line Interface):
CUPS (Common UNIX Printing System): A modular printing system for Unix-like computer operating systems which allows a computer to act as a print server.
NFS (Network File System):
DKMS (Dynamic Kernel Module Support): A program/framework that enables generating Linux kernel modules whose sources generally reside outside the kernel source tree. The concept is to have DKMS modules automatically rebuilt when a new kernel is installed.
JACK (Recursive Acronym: Jack Audio Connection Kit): Provides the audio backbone for Linux audio. It was developed for professional audio work & has extremely low latency which is necessary for synchronization in multi-track audio production,

Virtualization Technologies Acronyms:

VM (Virtual Machine):
OVMF (Open Virtual Machine Firmware):
VT-x (Intel Virtualization Technology): VT-x allows one hardware platform to function as multiple “virtual” platforms.
VT-d (Intel Virtualization Technology for Direct I/O): VT-d improves security and reliability of the systems and also improves performance of I/O devices in virtual environments.
HBA (Host Bus Adapter): A host bus adapter (HBA) is a circuit board and/or integrated circuit adapter that provides input/output (I/O) processing and physical connectivity between the host system/server and a storage and/or network device. A HBA relieves the host CPU of both data storage and retrieval tasks thus improving the server’s performance and response time.
IOMMU (Input-Output Memory Management Unit): A Memory Management Unit (MMU) that connects a Direct-Memory-Access-Capable (DMA-capable) I/O bus to the main memory. A example IOMMU is the Graphics Address Remappingh Table (GART) used by AGP and PCI Express graphics cards on Intel Architecture and AMD computer systems.
GART (Graphics Address Remapping Table):
DRBD (Distributed Replicated Block Device):
- A distributed replicated storage system for the Linux platform. It is implemented as a kernel driver, several user-space management applications and some shell scripts
RADOS (Reliable Autonomic Distributed Object Store):
SPICE (Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments): A new protocol for controlling virtual machines efficiently over a network. Spice supports image compression, video streaming, audio transmission, OpenSSL encryption, and much more. Communication between the host and guest systems relies on Virtual Device Interfaces (VDIs). Using Spice means access to nearly unlimited graphics resolutions on the virtual machine.
RFB Protocol (Remote Frame Buffer): The RFB is an open, simple protocol form remote access to graphical user interfaces. Because it works at the framebuffer level, it is applicable to all windowing systems and application, including: Microsoft Windows, macOS, and the X Window System. RFB is the protocol that is used in VNC and its derivatives.
VNC (Virtual Network Computing): Is a graphical desktop sharing system that used the RFB protocol to remotely control another computer. It transmits the keyboard and mouse events from one computer to another, relating the graphical screen updates back in the other direction over a network.
SPICE (Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments): Is a remote-display system built for virtual environments which allows users to view a computing “desktop” environment. Not only on its host, but also from anywhere on the Internet – using a wide variety of machine architectures.
VEPA (Virtual Ethernet Port Aggregator):
SR-IOV (Single Root I/O Virtualization):
STP (Spanning Tree Protocol):, also Stone Temple Pilots but not in the case): Is a Network Protocol that builds a loop-free logical topology for Ethernet Networks. The basic function of STP is to prevent bridge loops and the broadcast radiation that results from them. Spanning tree also allows a network design to include backup links to provide fault tolerance if an active link fails
PDU (Protocol Data Unit): In telecommunications, a Protocol Data Unit (PDU) is a single unit of information transmitted among peer entities of a computer network. A PDU is composed of protocol specific control information and user data.

Each PDU contains a payload called the Service Data Unit (SDU), along with protocol-related headers of footers.

SDU (Service Data Unit): In Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) terminology, a Service Data Unit (SDU) is a unit of data that has been passed down from an OSI layer or sub-layer to a lower layer. This unit of data (SDU) has not yet been encapsulated into a protocol data unit (PDU) by the lower layer. That SDU is then encapsulated into the lower layer’s PDU and the process continues until reaching the PHY, physical, or lowest layer of the OSI stack.
BPDU (Bridge Protocol Data Unit): Are frames that contain information about the Spanning Tree Protocol. For STP algorithms to function, the switches need to share information about themselves and their connections. What they share are bridge protocol data units (BPDUs). BPDUs are sent out as multicast frames to which only other layer 2 switches or bridges are listening. If any loops (multiple possible paths between switches) are found in the network topology, the switches will co-operate to disable a port or ports to ensure that there are no loops; that is, from one device to any other device in the layer 2 network, only one path can be taken.

Glossary of Virtualization Terms

Looking for more ‘initialisms?

Check out this List_of_information_technology_initialisms on Wikipedia.