Select the first letter of the word from the list above to jump to appropriate section of the glossary or type the term on which you want to search.

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Moore’s Law

a prediction made in 1965 by Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, stating the number of transistors occupying a square inch of integrated circuit material had doubled each year since the invention of the integrated circuit and that the multiplication of circuitry would continue. For the most part, the observation held true until the late 1970s when the time span of a year increased to about 18 months. Over time, Moore’s Law has erroneously been associated with the notion that microprocessor speeds would double each year.

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morph

short for metamorphosis, meaning the gradual, yet complete changing of an image to one that is totally different.

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Mosaic

a multimedia Web browser distributed freely (there are versions available for sale as well) by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) used for the viewing of HTML and other documents on the World Wide Web. Mosaic was widely responsible for the initial popularity of the Internet in the early 1990s.

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motherboard

the main circuit board of a computer which provides connections for all other peripherals such as the BIOS, serial ports and expansion slots. The motherboard houses the microprocessor and memory.

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Motorola Inc.

a leading manufacturer of microchips, providing integrated communications solutions, embedded electronic solutions including Software-en-hanced wireless telephone, two-way radio, messaging and satellite communications products and systems, as well as networking and Internet-access products for consumers, network operators, and commercial, government and industrial customers. Until the early 1990s, Motorola provided all of the microprocessors used in Apple Macintosh computers.

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mouse

a popular computer input device, vaguely shaped like a real mouse, that allows the user to select commands displayed on a monitor and easily initiate those commands by clicking the device. A mouse is used by moving it around a small field on a physical desktop (often a mousepad). Moving the mouse positions a pointer, or mouse cursor on the monitor. When the cursor is in position, (placed over a command button, or hyperlink) the mouse is clicked to initiate the command. The mouse was developed by Douglas Engelbart and Xerox Corporation in the 1970s, adopted by Apple soon after, and utilized with huge success by Microsoft with the introduction of Windows in the early 1990s. The mouse is a vital component of the graphical user interface. The plural of mouse is mice and they are available in cordless models.

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mouse potato

a slang term adapted from couch potato to describe an enthusiastic, perhaps obsessed, computer user.

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Mozilla

the original name for the Web browser, Netscape Navigator.

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MP3

(MPEG Third Layer) a standard for the compression of audio files allowing for high compression ratios without a loss in sound quality. The compression of the audio signal can be likened to an encrypting of sorts. A special player is required to listen to MP3.

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MPEG

(Motion Picture Experts Group) a standard for playing digital video and sound on a computer. MPEG is a file format using high compression. MPEG files are found on DVDs, CD-ROMs and Websites.