Tech Glossary: From PCB to SaaS

is part five. So if you're joining me now and saying, hey, the alphabet doesn't start with the letter P, that means you should probably go back, you know, several episodes to listen to the beginning of this series. So we're taking lots of popular groupings of letters that you typically see in tech, and we're explaining what those actually means. So when you come across them, you'll say, oh, I know what that stands for, and I know what it's for, so let's get back to it. First up is pc B.

This means printed circuit board. Alright, So a circuit is essentially a path for transmitting electric current, and you know, typically we make circuits so that we can have electric current do work for us in some way. For example, a circuit might include a path that leads to a

light bulb that has an incandescent filament inside it. The current flows through the path, flows into the light bulb goes through that filament, causing it to heat up and incandesce or give off light, and then the current continues through to the end of the circuit, which is pretty simple. Now, in the early days of circuitry, you would use conductive wire to connect all the elements of your circuits. But wires take up space, they can get tangled, they can

get disconnected. Uh, you would have to solder things. If we could only depend upon the types of circuits that you can build with like bread boards and stuff where you're just learning, all of our electronics would be much much larger, and again you would have to sauder stuff. That's a very slow and painstaking process, especially when you first start and you're not too sure of yourself, and if you make a mistake, it really slows you down

even more. Then, in nine a guy named Charles Ducas filed a patent for a design that served as a foundation for modern circuits. What he did was he took a wooden board and he used a stencil, and he laid the stencil against the wooden board, and then he attached conductive materials onto the board itself. Through this stincil. The conductive materials served the same purpose as wires, but it laid flat against the boards, which saved a lot

of space and hassle. Move forward a little more than a decade, and in nineteen thirty six you had an Austrian inventor named Paul Eisler who made the first actual printed circuit board. While Ducas had stenciled conductive material to a board, Eisler had experience with industrial printers that were used in the publishing world, and he theorized that he could use that same sort of technology to print a

circuit directly to a non conductive base. That's really important, you know, do costed the same thing he used a wooden board. Wood is non conductive. The material that the circuit is built on top of has to be non conductive, or else you can't channel where the current is supposed to go. It'll just flow through all the conductive material. So with modern PCBs we call this base the substrate.

Printing a circuit board solved tons of problems. For one thing, as long as you design your circuit properly on the front end, and as long as the printing equipment was working as intended. You could print and reproduce your circuit without having to be fussed about making a mistake. You weren't in danger of soldering a wire to the wrong contact or anything like that, so that was a huge benefit to this approach. Paul Eisler's story is a really

dramatic one. There are a lot of trials and tribulations and tragedy and triumphlets of alliteration there, and I may have to dedicate a full episode to him in the future because it's a pretty fascinating story. These days, PCBs tend to be made by taking a non conductive substrate

then laminating a thin layer of copper foil to the surface. Now, copper is conductive, so you might wonder, well, what gives if you completely coat the surface with a copper coding and well there's a following step which involves using chemicals to etch the copper away. So what you do is you coat the bits of copper you want to keep, you know, the stuff that's actually going to serve as

the connective channels for your circuit components. So all the circuit tree parts, you cote that with a protective chemical you leave the rest of the copper uncovered. Then when you introduced the chemicals to the circuit board, the chemicals are only able to eat the exposed copper away. They leave behind all the stuff that you've protected, and voila,

you've got your printed circuit board. You can also make circuit boards with much smaller channels this way, using the etching method, and you'll find PCBs in all sorts of modern electronics. Computer motherboards are a type of PCB. Smartphones, radios, DVD players, game consoles, cars, systems, tons of stuff have printed circuit boards in them. It's pretty nifty. Okay. Moving on p d A. Now, in tech this does not

refer to public displays of affection. And I'm not going to make some sort of you know, crew joke about how tech nerds don't have experience with that type of p d A because that joke is old and tired and not accurate, thank you very much. It's in fact so old and tired that it's even more old and tired than I am. And that's saying something. But no, a p d A in this context is a personal digital assistant, which is more or less just a handheld computer.

These devices predated the smartphone. One way to describe a traditional p d A is to say it was kind of like a smartphone without the phone part. In the old days, you would have your p d A and you would use a cable or a docking station to sinc the pd A to a computer, and software running on your computer would interact with the doct p d A and transfer over information like contacts, new email documents,

et cetera. This could go both ways. The p d A could end up adding new context to your database on your computer, and that way you would have access to this information on the go while your computer remained packed up or back at the office. They were really just an electronic version of the old pen and paper schedulers and appointment calendars that you know, organized people relied upon.

While you could make a decent argument that the nineteen four British made handheld computer called the Ion Organizer counts as a p d A, I think most folks would really point to the early nineteen nineties when talking about the earliest p d A s and we get the term personal digital assistant from Apple and the infamous Apple

Newton in Two Apples. Then CEO John Scully, someone who is frequently reviled in the history of Apple, revealed the Newton at C E S and yeah, back in the day, way back in the day, Apple would actually attend C E S. How how times have changed. The Newton was to have handwriting recognition technology, and it would allow people to write notes down on a digital screen using a special stylus, and the Newton would then, in theory, convert the handwritten stuff you put on the screen into text

and you would have an electronic copy of your notes. Now, some technical shortcomings gave Newton a bad name early on, though Apple would continue to work on the technology and improve it. However, our first impressions are really hard to shake, and generally speaking, the Apple Newton became something of a joke, literally in the case of a Simpsons episode. But many

other companies introduced PDAs over the years. One of the big ones was Palm, and over time companies would build in capabilities to allow PDAs to connect directly to the Internet, removing the necessity to dock a p d A with a computer to transfer information to the p d A. For the most part, smartphones have replaced p d A s. As you know smartphone apps replicate the various functions found in those old devices. But it was a pretty darn

good run. It's just a short one, and I've heard some folks, including myself, use p d A to refer to stuff like Sirie, Google Assistant, and Alexa. But I suspect this is not super accurate and that I am guilty of perpetuating a misunderstanding, for which I apologize. I think the generally accepted terms for those kind of things are smart assistant or virtual assistant, and sometimes just personal assistant, So I will try to remember not to use personal

digital assistant when referring to stuff like Siri. Next up p d F. This stands for Portable Document Format. So the company Adobe developed the PDF format to address a problem. Let's say that you are working on electronic document and a word processing program on a PC, and that this is back in the early nineties, and you want to send this document to someone else for them to review it. But that person uses a Mac computer and the Mac computer is not compatible with the file formats that your

PC based word processing program generates. So what do you do? Adobe solution was creating a file type that isn't tied to a specific operating system or a type of hardware, or a type of word processing or you know, productivity software. It was, however, proprietary to Adobe nearly two decades before the company released it as an open standard in two thousand eight. The original concept was that you would create a document with whichever software you were reliant upon and

on whatever type of computer you happen to own. Then you would convert that document to the PDF format, which effectively captured the document in its final state. Then you could send that BDF to whomever you needed to and they would be able to view it on whatever type of machine they used. However, you did need a special PDF viewer to look at those documents, at least initially. The file sizes could get quite big as well, uh larger than the native file formats you were working with.

So let's say you were making a word document then you converted it to PDF. You would see that the PDF file might be much larger than the word file, and they weren't meant to be edited, so making changes to a PDF file wasn't really meant to be a thing. A b DF is kind of more like an image than a document file. It's more like a picture of a document. It is possible to edit them these days, either directly using Adobe products or using software like Microsoft

Word or the cloud based Google Drive suite. And when creating PDFs, you can make some fields interactive, which allows people to place digital signatures on files and that kind of thing, or you know, check boxes in a checklist. But one thing that I think is important to remember is that PDF files can sometimes also be hosts to malware.

Because PDFs can hold embedded code, including hyperlinks or those interactive fields, it is possible to embed malware within a PDF itself, so it's always good to keep your antivirus software up to date. It's also a good idea to scan your files if you aren't confident that they came from a safe source, or just not open them at all if you aren't you know, sure of where they came from. This is a good rule in general. Next, we've U P HP and originally this initialism stood for

personal home page, but now it doesn't. It's kind of like how MTV used to stand for Music Television but now it's just MTV, or how AMC used to be American Movie Classics, but now it's just a MC p HP is a type of scripting language used in web development. It's an open source language and it can be embedded into HTML, which is hypertext markup language. We covered that

in a previous episode in this series. PHP code executes on the server side of things, and it can be used to make dynamic web content, meaning content that actually changes either because of an interaction that happens on a web page or it just is able to change over time. This is a good time for us to kind of reflect and remember the old old days of the web. So back when the World Wide Web was very young, it took a pretty good amount of work to make

a web page. You might use a document program. For instance, I used just a very simple text editor program to build out a page in HTML before then uploading the code to a server. Then you would hop on over onto a web browser and see what the results were of your hard work and whether or not you laid out your page correctly or if in fact you were going to have to go back into that text editor

and make some changes to your HTML code. It was a fairly slow process and because of that, and because HTML initially didn't really support dynamic elements, it would mean that most web pages you encountered would be static. That is, each web page was sort of a stable document and it didn't change. So if you visited someone's web page, there wasn't real really much point in visiting it again. I mean, it's just it's going to be the same page.

You could click on links and stuff and go to other you know, web pages or documents or whatever, but what you saw on the web page was going to remain the same over time. PHP is one of the scripting languages that allows developers to create web pages that are not static, but they can update or change in real time. Dynamic scripting allows for stuff like posting comments on a page and having them show up. That's one of the simplest versions I could think of. Dynamic elements

allow for stuff like e commerce. Without it, businesses web page might be nothing more than the electronic equivalent of an advertising flyer, you know, maybe giving a perspective customer and email address to write to or a phone number to call. As I record this. PHP version eight point one point oh Alpha two is in early testing. It is not yet ready for production, but it is a scripting language that continues to receive updates, so that's kind of cool. Okay, we've got a lot more letters of

the alphabet to get through. Let's take a quick break, all right. Next up, we've got p n G, or portable network Graphics. Some people pronounce it as ping, which is somewhat confusing because ping is something else. A ping in tech typically is when you're talking about a signal that's sent from a client to a server to wait for a response and find out how much latency there is between the two connections, so you know how much of a delay there is between the two. That's not

what this gonna ping is. P n G is a graphics file format that supports lossless data compression, So that means it uses a method to compress file sizes that does not discard information about the file itself. When you view the image, you get all the information from the original. This makes it similar to the GIF file format or or jeff if you insist on being wrong. Uh. And this is in contrast with the JPEG format. Jpeg uses

a lossy form of compression. Now, the PM format can compress down further than a GIFT can, and that means that many of the images on the web these days are actually PM files not GIF files. Greater compression means you get smaller file sizes. That means faster loading times when you're visiting a web page. It also means less bandwidth usage, so there are a lot of benefits to it.

The group that developed PNG aimed to create a format that would allow for better color recreation, and also to make a format that wouldn't be covered under a patent. That would mean that people and companies would actually be able to use this new format without having to apply for a license from a patent holder in order to do so. The format also allows control of opacity and transparency,

which is quite handy. This is what allows people to make images that lay right on top of a background without having that irritating block of white around the image, you know, kind of like a canvas or frame. And with aacity control, it's possible to make parts of the image transparent and parts of it opaque. That could come in pretty handy depending upon what effect you're striving for.

Moving on, we've got raid. It's not a not an insect aside in this case, here's an acronym that actually has two similar full names and they both mean the same thing. So another example of this in this series was digital versatile disc and digital video disc. Both of those mean DVD. They're both for the same thing. It's just that digital versatile disc is the quote unquote official

name for it. Anyway. A RAID is either a redundant array of independent discs or a redundant array of inexpensive discs. And it's a very practical solution to some pretty common problems. Problem no one technology breaks and I'm sure we've all experienced this. Maybe your computer keeps crashing, maybe your car are won't start, maybe the washing machine starts making this weird, high pitched sound and then it just gives up. The ghost stuff breaks down thanks a lot in tropy stupid

laws of the universe. But what if you happen to be reliant on digital information, like that's the basis of your business or some endeavor you're pursuing, and if access to the digital information went away, you would be up the proverbial poopy creek without a paddle. That would be what we call in the tech business, a bad thing. So you'd probably want to store the information in a couple of different places so that if one of those

things fails, you would still have it somewhere else. In fact, some of us do this in our day to day lives without even having it ever touched tech. I know I have written down the same thing a few times in different places so that I can make sure I had access to it. This is called redundancy, the practice of having backups so that you're not at a loss if your primary system should fail. And then there's the

word inexpensive. That's also important. Sure, you could create a system in which you were using the top of the line equipment with the fastest processors and all of that kind of stuff. But if what you're really just trying to do is store some information, then going with that sort of bleeding edge technology would be a really big waste. It would just be throwing way too much hardware at

something that didn't need that as a solution. What you really need is something that's reliable, but it doesn't have to be the best of the best. You just need something that's going to work when you need it to. And even then you can start tweaking these settings a little bit, right Like, you can think of this like sliders on a control board. Maybe you've got one slider that's labeled cost and you've got a second slider that's

labeled reliability, and their linked to each other. And the more rely will the tech, the more expensive it is. And in fact, the cost might increase faster than the reliability does. So maybe when you're at you know, level three, cost is three and reliability is three. But if you move reliability up to five, suddenly cost is six and reliability is five. Move reliability up to seven, cost is ten. You see what I'm saying, Like, costs can get higher

faster than you actually see an increased reliability. But maybe you find a sweet spot somewhere that because the cost is at a certain level, you can have several redundant systems to support each service, and yeah they're not the most reliable, but the reliable enough you might see some failures, but you would save money on the far end of it because the cheaper systems work well enough that you didn't have to shell out the big, big bucks for the more expensive ones. So it becomes this sort of

risk analysis kind of thing. You figure out, well, how likely is any system to go down at any given time, how many backups do I need to make sure that that is not a problem, and how expensive will it be, and generally speaking, you can go for some pretty cheap stuff. Big data centers use RAID servers to handle data through virtualization. Now that refers to using computer software to build out a virtual machine that relies on actual physical hardware but

isn't necessarily tied to a single device. You can have a computer running one or more virtual machines, or you can have virtual machines that are kind of distributed across multiple computers. Using virtualization and RAID architecture, companies can have high performance, reliable systems and not freak out should part of it go down. And I'm pretty sure just about

every cloud service out there relies on RAID implementations. There are different ways to handle the redundancy aspect, but the goal is always the same to provide a way to ensure service is not going to get interrupted even in the event of a catastrophic failure of one system. Like let's say that a server just breaks down entirely, maybe it's power supply goes bad. Others can then end up

taking on the load because they are redundant systems. Now, there there are other things that can go wrong and they can interrupt service, like if the communication lines out to the general Internet are broken. Well, it doesn't matter how many redundant systems you have, right if your communication channel is cut, then you don't have any way of communicating. So there are other things that can go wrong, but at least on this particular end of the system, you

have some failsafe measures. There's a lot more that could be said about RAID systems. I could go into a lot more detail, but I'm gonna save that for a full episode in the future at some point. Next up, we got RAM and DRAM and stram and RAM, or rather r A M d R A M S d R A M v R A M, etcetera. So welcome to the many flavors of random access memory. That's what RAMS stands for. I would call it random access memories, but that's a daft punk album, which is awesome of course,

But that's not what I need to cover today. First, let's talk about computer memory in general. So computers, when you boil them down, uh, but you know, don't boil them down. That will invalidate your warranty anyway. Computers are machines that take data, they perform some type of operation on that data, and they produce output based on the outcome of that process. Now, the data needs to come

from somewhere. It could come directly from input, like you know, a switch being thrown, or a key being pressed or a button being pushed, or a computer might pull data from a long term storage solution such as a hard disk. But to work quickly and efficiently, computers need a way to store at least some information temporarily in order to refer back to that. And sometimes techno nerds like me will use analogy of long term versus short term memory

with humans. Data stored on a hard drive is more like long term memory, it's there for the long haul, but RAM is more like short term memory. Like if someone tells you, hey, just so you know, you need

to push on that door to open it. You've got the information stored in short term memory, and you can use that info when you go up to the door, but you don't necessarily need it forever, right like, if you're only going through that door once, you really just need that information long enough to not make you look like a weirdo as you are pulling very hard on a door that's meant to be pushed. Now, beyond this little surface level, this analogy starts to break down. So

we're gonna shift a bit. We're not gonna you know, it's not exactly the same. It's not apples to apples. Computer memory represents a way for a computer to reference information quickly without seeking it in long term storage and random access memory is dynamic, meaning it can be read from or chain to buy the computer without a problem.

It can also be accessed in any order, which gives the computer a quick ability to go straight to the bit of data in the memory that's necessary, that's needed for whatever is going on, without having to read through all the data in random axis memory. To use another analogy, let's say that you're told to find the specific quote there was only one catch, and that was catch twenty

two from the novel catch twenty two. But you're not giving any information about where in the novel that quote appears. You would probably start from the very beginning of the book and start scanning the novel line by line looking for that quote, which is time consuming. But let's say instead you have a reference that gives you the chapter and page number, and it tells you to look in chapter five to find this quote. Now you can skip right over chapters one through four, you can go to

where the info you need happens to be. That's kind of like how RAM works. The computer doesn't have to scan through the entirety of what's in this dynamic memory to find what it needs. RAM can also be volatile, meaning that if you were to turn off your computer, the information stored within the machines RAM gets wiped out. RAM is really only important for helping to do the things that you're actually doing on the computer right then and there, so it doesn't need to get etched in

stone or anything. You've got long term storage for that kind of thing. That's RAM in a nutshell. But let's talk about these other flavors really quickly, and this is just a very high level I'm not going to dive into each of these. That would take way too long. So d RAM stands for dynamic random access memory and s d RAM is a subtype of that. It's called

synchronous dynamic random access memory. There's also d d R s d RAM, which at first I thought was dance Dance Revolution s d RAM, but no. In fact, d d R stands for it double data rate. Now, generally speaking, these behave very much in the same way as RAM, but with improved efficiency and speed for certain applications and implementation. So it's you could say, it's RAM but better. D RAM requires more power and generates more heat than your run of the mill RAM does, however, so there are

tradeoffs here. Then we've got v RAM. This is video RAM, which is a variant of dynamic RAM, and it used to be a popular way to help buffer frames and graphics cards so that you would have a smooth experience running graphic intensive applications like you know, like video games. It's not really used anymore, however. It's essentially been replaced by s d RAM, which eventually got good enough so

that we didn't need a specialized video RAM anymore. Next, we have our f C. The stands for request for comments. It's also a pretty misleading term these days, but back in the old days, and RFC really was more of a request for comments than it is today, and it was all in an effort to initiate a dialogue about how to set up the systems that one day would

be the the stuff that powers the Internet. Alright, so, way back in the nineteen sixties, you had a group of researchers and engineers and scientists who are working for the Department of Defense in an effort to build out networking technology UH and ultimately to create what was called

ARPA Net. In the ARPA Net project, it wasn't practical to have everyone present at every working group meeting in order to hash out the various protocols and approaches and even philosophies that the group would initiate in order to

make computer and networking reality. However, there was also kind of a general desire not to create an environment in which maybe one small working group, for example, makes some sort of declarative proclamation of this is how it must be so the RFC approach, and which researchers would circulate a proposed set of specifications or protocols or whatever, would allow others to chime in and make suggestions or ask

for clarification. The goal was to make better systems through this kind of collaborative approach, and not to have any one working group dominate the process. Now, over time, these documents became less about bringing an input and more about just circulating technical information about the Internet, including the actual infrastructure of computer networks, the protocols used by machines to communicate with one another, and even more general concepts related

to networking. It's more about providing a series of technical documents that explain the underpinnings of networks in general and the Internet in particular, rather than encouraging some form of group discussion. Once published, and RFC never changes, it is not edited, it is not updated. This means that sometimes there are errors in an RFC, then that means they're

there forever. The I E. T F one of the organizations that oversee these r f c s. It does have a way for people to report errors and it does keep track of all errata. Next up is r F I D. This stands for radio frequency identification. It's actually a subset of automatic identification and data capture or

a I D C technologies. Now, generally speaking, these technologies involved systems that allow for automatic detection of something specific, and it includes identifying those specific things and then collecting data about those specific things and maybe even incorporating that data into databases without the need for a human operator. It can all be on the automated side of things. And I'm sure you've interacted with r F I D tags before, and r F I D tag has the

information coded directly into it. So the r f I D tag itself is an integrated circuit and it can be a really thin and flexible one. Even it can be in tags and stuff that are flexible. Uh this sort it also includes an antenna. Now, most r f I D chips are passive r f I D chips, which means they don't have any power on their own. They don't broadcast or anything like that. They are just there. However, when they are brought within the broadcast reach of a of an r f I D reader, which is essentially

broadcasting radio waves of a certain frequency, things change. The r f I D tags antenna will pick up on those radio waves which passed through the antenna, and then it'll turn into essentially electricity. The whole process for that is one I've covered several times in tech stuff. But the energy goes into the passive chip that modulates the signal and then broadcasts the modulated signal back out which

the reader can pick up on. That gives the reader whatever information was hard coded into that r f I D and that information can be lots of different stuff. In fact, there are a lot of security systems that use this sort of approach. You get badges that are containing thin r f I D chips inside them and the r f I D m the badge has a identification in it that should match up to a database of authorized personnel. Okay, so you walk up to a door and it has an r f I D reader

next to it. That's your little badge reader. You hold the badge up. The r f I D reader is constantly sending out this low power radio signal. The r f I D chip inside your badge detects the signal, it goes through the antenna. It creates this modulated frequency that gets sent back the reader picks up on. That compares your badge to a database of authorized users. If you show up on that boom, you get in. If you don't show up on that, the door stays locked.

There are also active r f I D chips. These are chips that actually require a battery. They have to have a power source because these chips do constantly broadcast out information that can be picked up by readers. They also tend to be bulk here because they require a power source, they're more expensive, and they're not really necessary for a lot of the applications that we typically use. R F I D four. Okay, it's time for another break. But when we come back, we will continue down the

RS like a pirate. Next up is r G B and this stands for red, green, and blue. It's an additive color model. That means it's a color model in which you can create different colors by adding different amounts or intensities of the three primary colors of the model together. In this case red, green, and blue. So to get white, you would add all three together. And this works when you're talking about light, right, when you're talking about wavelengths

of light, because essentially you're adding wavelengths together. If you remember from the color spectrum, know that it's not just that it goes from red to orange, to yellow, to green, to blue, to indigo to violet, but that the wavelength of light for each of those bands is different with with it getting smaller as you get further into the spectrum. So red wavelengths have the longest wavelengths and then violet

has the shortest. And UM. Yeah, by adding different lights together, you're essentially adding the wavelengths together, and you can adjust the color that way. This UM this really only works when you're talking about light. If you're using physical dyes like actual paint or something. If you were to keep mixing all the colors together, then you would end up with black or really just a really dark, unpleasant color.

So it doesn't work with that approach. It only works really with light display technologies rely on the r GB color model. Older displays had cables and and and ports for composite signals. That was not as nice like that's where these different light sources would be merged together before being sent to a display. But by keeping these signals separate in their red, green, and blue colors, our GB displays can combine them into a better quality image. That

was a short one. Let's move on. How about r I s C or RISK. This actually stands for reduced instruction set computer. So your typical computer is a general purpose device, which means it needs to be able to do a little bit of everything. But in order for a machine to be capable of doing a bit of everything, you have to make certain sacrifices when it comes to

stuff like speed and efficiency. If you were to optimize a machine for a subset of routines, you might make it perform at you know, a lower rate for anything outside of those routines, but anything that fell into its wheelhouse it could do really, really well. So when you're making a general purpose machine, you might just bite the bullet and create a system that can handle pretty much everything but isn't really optimized for anything. In particular. Risk, however,

relies on highly optimized instruction sets. So let's say you want to build out a system that would really focus on something specific like video processing. This task doesn't require your system to also be good at other stuff. It just needs to be wicked good at processing video, So you architect a system that optimizes everything towards video production. Now, if you want to use the system to process videos, it's really fast, much faster than a general purpose computer

would be. In fact, you can have an optimized video processing station that's faster than a general purpose computer, even if that general purpose computer technically has better hardware in it, like a better processor, because optimization can go a really long way. But another way to look at it is just in how processors complete instructions. So the opposite of an R I s C machine is a C I

s C, or complex instruction set computer. A complex instruction might involve lots of individual steps per instruction, and a a c I s C or CISK CPU would understand that. You would understand, oh, this one instruction involves multiple steps, and would execute those steps to complete the task. For an r I s C system, first you would have to break down those steps into simpler instructions, and depending on the task, the r I s C machine might complete the overall effort faster than the C I s

C machine. But if the task means that the RISK system is having to break down lots of complex instructions into simpler ones, the CISC machine wins out. So it's all dependent upon what applications you're trying to run. You can think of RISK machines as needing instructions to be broken down to their most basic level before it can execute them, whereas a CISCU machine can take a more general set of instructions and get to work. So there's

not really one that's better than the other. It's all dependent upon how you're using them and how they've been optimized. Next up, we've got ROM. This stands for read only memory. Now, remember when we talked about RAM and how that kind of memory is volatile. I mean, once you shut down a machine, the information in RAM goes away. Well. ROM is non volatile. It is hard coded, so ROM includes hard coded instructions that persist whether the computer is on

or not. Also, as the describer read only suggests, this type of memory cannot be changed under normal circumstances. You can read from this, but you cannot write to it. And if you're an old Fogy like me, you might remember the days of home video game consoles that took cartridges. The cartridges actually had printed circuit boards inside them, and

these were ROMs. The game everything from the graphics to the instructions on how the console should respond to player input, to the music, you know, everything that made the game the game was printed on the circuit boards. They were unchangeable unless you were to like break open the cartridge and get the old soldering iron out and make some changes by hand, which is not recommended by the way. So the stuff that goes into ROM typically includes the

instructions the computer needs to start up. It's kind of like the basic information the computer uses in the booting process, and that's why you wouldn't really want to be able to change it. Next up, we have r t F that stands for Rich Text Format which is a proprietary document format from Microsoft. The company introduced this format in then with the intent for it to be kind of

a step up from plain old text files. So unlike you know, the the older text files, the RTF format can actually hold some extra information that text files can't, including stuff like font style you don't get that with regular text files, or how to incorporate images is another feature that you don't find in text files. Now, it's nowhere near as feature full as like you know, a word document from Microsoft would be. However, lots of different apps and programs can open r t F files, but

they can't open word files. So if you need to type up a document but you couldn't be certain that the people you were going to share this document with had word you might go with r TF. Microsoft ended development of r TF back in two thousand eight. Now that doesn't mean the format disappeared. Many word processing apps

still support it because of that universality. You might open a file using one word processing program, make some changes to it, save it back as r TF, then open that same file but using a totally different computer with a different operating system and a different word processing program. In order to continue so it still has its uses, though with the growth of cloud based solutions, it's not

quite as relevant as it used to be. Next, we have S A A S, big S, little, A little, A big S, and this ties right into what we were just talking about. S A A S stands for software as a service, and this marks a different approach to the software business from the old days. So let's talk about those old days and about how we moved

from product to service. All right, So it's the early nineteen eighties and you just bought your first personal computer and you're so excited, and you're gonna go shopping for some software that you want on your new PC. And you want to use this PC to do some productivity work. So you invest in a word processing program and a

spreadsheet program and maybe a few other applications. You purchase each of these from some software company, maybe all of them come from the same company, and each program has a set price, so you pay the price and boom, the program is yours to install on your computer, and the transaction is over. That's it. You've got it. Now.

Over time, maybe the software company releases new versions of those programs with you know, more features and stuff and if you want to be able to use those features, you would need to go out and buy the new version of this program and then install that on your computer. However, each purchase would be its own discrete event. You buy it, you install it, it's yours. Now let's take a little

step forward. Let's say that you start to run a small office and you want each of your employees to have a computer that's running a certain suite of software. You might make an arrangement with big company like Microsoft to get a license for multiple copies of software. Because you're not supposed to just buy one copy of a program and then install it on five or ten computers or whatever. Companies actually developed ways to prevent users from doing that. There are penalties if you try and work

around it. So now you get a license to use a certain number of installations of software. It's a little bit different from before. But let's take another step forward. Now, Let's say you're running an office and you find that there's a company that's offering a suite of productivity solutions that are running over the cloud. So the actual applications like the word processor and the spreadsheet program, they're all running on servers on the Internet. They're not running on

your own computers. You use the Internet to connect to those services. So instead of installing software to your machines, you use some form of client software to access them, which is probably just a web browser. Rather than purchasing the software outright, you're paying a subscription fee in order to access the software. There are pros and cons to this. As a user, the big con, as I guess you can spot right off the bat, is that you're not just making a single purchase and then that's the end

of the transaction. Instead, you have this recurring subscription fee, so you continue to pay for the product as you use it, or as I should say, you continue to pay for the service as you use it. But on the pro side of things, with software as a service, you can expect to benefit from improvements to the software over time. You know, in the old days, like I said, you would have to purchase a new version of the software when the company would release it if you wanted

those features. Instead, with software as a service, you get those benefits as the company that provides the service improves the cloud based software. So as long as you're a subscriber, you get access to those new features that means no more having to upgrade all of your offices copies of say Microsoft off this every few years. Instead, you just subscribe to this software as a service and you get

the new features as they are implemented. The other big benefit to software as a service is that you might be able to access the software with any compatible machine as long as you have your log in credentials. So, in other words, you don't have to worry if this new computer has the software loaded onto it. We're not as long as it has web browser or you know,

whatever the client is to access the service. It makes the software way more flexible and portable because you, as a user, can access it with any compatible network connected device. So let's say that I forgot my work computer at the office I accidentally left it there. Well, fortunately, because we're using a lot of cloud based productivity software, I could use my home computer and log into my account via the cloud and get access to all of my notes,

all of my scripts, everything like that. Uh, because I'm able to access it through this cloud based service as opposed to it having a native application running on just my office computer. For companies like Microsoft, this approach is crazy profitable, like profit margin, so from a revenue sense, it works out great, and it can actually cost less money for the user over time. If we're talking about the kind of user who would regularly upgrade to the

latest version of a software package once it was released. If, however, the user is the type who would normally just stick with a basic version of software until like the heat death of the Universe, it would not be as good a deal. The A a S or as a service extension goes to tons of other stuff as well. Like there's platform as a service or p a a S. That's where you have a company providing a typically a modular computer GRAHAM for the purposes of developing, deploying, or

running applications. But there's lots of other stuff. There's artificial intelligence as a service, there's big data as a service, games as a service, machine learning as a service. The list goes on and on. Essentially, it all comes down to this switch from treating software or whatever as a product to treating it as an ongoing service. You know, something you can smack an ongoing subscription fee onto. We see this reflected in how we consume media these days.

I'm guessing a lot of the music and movies and television shows you watch come to you through some sort of streaming service. Again, we've migrated away from purchasing something like an album or a Blu ray or whatever, and we've moved towards media through a subscription based streaming service. Or maybe it's not a subscription based service. Maybe it supports itself through ads, but it's the same basic idea.

It's a brave new world. I suppose I am cautiously optimistic that our next episode will close out the last of our acronyms and initialisms for now, So join me on Wednesday to get through the rest of the alphabet. In the meantime, if you have suggestions for future topics I should cover on tech stuff, reach out to me and let me know what they are. A lot of you have been doing that. It's awesome. Keep doing it.

The Twitter handle where you can reach me is text stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.