Specifications

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Appendix A Glossary
adjusts to the fastest possible speed during connec-
tion. MNP Level 10EC is an improved version of
MNP Level 10, adding more reliability and support
for cellular phone hand-offs.
MO (magneto-optical) MO drives use both
magnetic and optical storage properties. MO tech-
nology is erasable and recordable, as opposed to
CD-ROM (read-only) and WORM (write-once)
drives. MO uses laser and magnetic field technol-
ogy to record and erase data.
mobile module (MMO) A type of processor
packing from Intel for mobile computers consisting
of a Pentium or newer processor mounted on a
small daughterboard along with the processor volt-
age regulator, the system’s L2 cache memory, and
the North Bridge part of the motherboard chipset.
modem (modulator/demodulator) A device
that converts electrical signals from a computer
into an audio form transmittable over telephone
lines, or vice versa. It modulates, or transforms, dig-
ital signals from a computer into the analog form
that can be carried successfully on a phone line; it
also demodulates signals received from the phone
line back to digital signals before passing them to
the receiving computer. To avoid confusion with
other types of Internet connection devices such as
cable modems, modems are often called analog
modems or dialup modems.
modulation The process of modifying some
characteristic of a carrier wave or signal so that it
varies in step with the changes of another signal,
thus carrying the information of the other signal.
module An assembly that contains a complete
circuit or subcircuit.
MOESI Short for modified owned exclusive shared
invalid, it’s a cache coherency protocol used by
AMD Opteron processors.
monitor See display.
monochrome display adapter See MDA.
MOS (metal-oxide semiconductor) Refers to
the three layers used in forming the gate structure
of a field-effect transistor (FET). MOS circuits offer
low-power dissipation and enable transistors to be
jammed closely together before a critical heat prob-
lem arises. PMOS, the oldest type of MOS circuit,
is a silicon-gate P-channel MOS process that uses
currents made up of positive charges. NMOS is a
silicon-gate N-channel MOS process that uses cur-
rents made up of negative charges and is at least
twice as fast as PMOS. CMOS, complementary
MOS, is nearly immune to noise, runs off almost
any power supply, and is an extremely low-power
circuit technique.
motherboard The main circuit board in the
computer. Also called planar, system board, or
backplane.
Mount Rainier (Mt. Rainier) A standard
developed by Philips for CD-RW and DVD+RW
drives that provides for native operating system
support of rewriteable media. Drives and operating
systems (such as Windows Vista) that support the
Mount Rainier standard can read or write Mount
Rainier–formatted CD-R/RW or DVD+R/RW media
without the need for proprietary packet-reading
software such as Roxio’s UDF Volume Reader for
DirectCD-formatted media (www.roxio.com).
Mount Rainier compliant drives may carry the
Philips EasyWrite marketing name and logo.
mouse An input device invented by Douglas
Engelbart of Stanford Research Center in 1963 and
popularized by Xerox in the 1970s. A mechanical
mouse consists of a roller ball and a tracking mech-
anism on the underside that relays the mouse’s
horizontal and vertical position to the computer,
allowing precise control of the pointer location
onscreen. The top side features two or three but-
tons and possibly a small wheel used to select or
click items onscreen. Old-style optical mice sold in
the 1980s used a single optical sensor and a grid-
marked pad as an alternative to the roller ball. The
latest optical mice use two optical sensors and can
be moved across virtually any nonmirrored surface.
MPC A trademarked abbreviation for Multimedia
Personal Computer. The original MPC specification
was developed by Tandy Corporation and Microsoft
as the minimum platform capable of running mul-
timedia software. In the summer of 1995, the MPC
Marketing Council introduced an upgraded MPC 3
standard. The MPC 1 Specification defines the fol-
lowing minimum standard requirements: a 386SX
or 486 CPU, 2MB RAM, 30MB hard disk, VGA
video display, 8-bit digital audio subsystem, CD-
ROM drive, and systems software compatible with
the applications programming interfaces (APIs) of
Microsoft Windows version 3.1 or later. The MPC 2
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