<i>Tech Jargon IV</i>
Readers, hope my series is helping you make your way through your office and friend-circle conversations with confidence.
Today let's talk about peripherals. Peripherals refer to devices or machines that can be attached to your computer in order to carry out specific tasks. Examples of peripherals are your printers, scanners, webcams etc.
So let's go on with today's word stock.
Touch pad: As the name suggests, a touch pad works a lot like a mouse by helping you guide your cursor on the screen. It basically consists of a pressure-sensitive pad where you can place a digital pen or even your finger and it will respond to your pen or finger's movement and pressure. I've always had a thing against the mouse because of its uncanny resemblance to those domestic pests that creep around your house, nibbling at your food. Whoever thought of giving such a handy tool such an obnoxious shape? So for me, the touch pad is great news indeed, because that means I can finally get rid of the mouse.
The touch pad can be found built into all laptops these days. You can also purchase one separately and attach it to your PC. It's a great favourite among architects, designers and artists.
TWAIN: Amusingly, the word TWAIN stands for "Technology Without An Interesting Name". People are running out of interesting nomenclatures! I think the Oxford people ought to do something about it. Anyway, coming back to the topic, why I included this word in today's stock, besides the point that I found it very amusing, is that it is related to scanners, which is another example of a peripheral. TWAIN is actually a standard language, which computers use to communicate with scanners.
Inkjet: A very popular colour printer technology. Inkjet printers work by squirting tiny jets of ink onto your paper with great precision. Of course, this technology, although still quite popular, is fast getting replaced by laser printer technology, where lasers guide powdered ink onto paper into the required pattern. Why people prefer laser printers to inkjets is that Inkjets print a line at a time, taking more time than a laser printer, which prints a page at a time.
Bluetooth: Although the name may remind you of a horrific monster with blue coloured teeth, the bluetooth is thankfully quite harmless. Ask any teenager about it and they'll give you a cartload of information. A bluetooth is a device that enables wireless communication between PCs and other devices like mobile phones. A number of mobile phone models these days provide the bluetooth facility, which allows you to transfer music, pictures and other information to and from PCs and other mobile phones.
USB: This one doesn't exactly belong to the group of peripherals, but my reason for including it here is that it is related. The USB, which stands for Universal Serial Bus is a type of port (or connector) used to attach extra devices to a PC, such as a scanner, digital camera or pen drive. Many PCs nowadays use USB ports to connect the mouse and the keyboard to the CPU.