Tork proper like wot we does

One of the things that I really notice about Amiga people is not only do they have a bewildering variety of set-ups for their machines, but they also have several weird and wacky ways of pronouncing computer-related terminology. We not saying that we're perfect (you say "emm you eye" and we say "mooey"), but since we're the general arbiter of taste and the only reference some Amiga owners have access to, we thought we may as well give you a handy pronunciation guide this issue. If there are any words you feel we've missed out, let us know, and we'll put this guide into our FAQ section and keep it updated from month to month.

Word Pronounced     Meaning
Gigabyte gig a bite ("gig" is like the music concert) 1024� or 1,073,741,824 bytes. Some manufacturers think that Gigabytes are just decimal numbers, so 1 billion (American) bytes equals a Gigabyte - this is why you feel you're getting gipped when you buy a 4.3GB drive and it only turns out to hold 4GB.

SCSI scuhzzy The drive interface for SCSI drives. You can recognise a SCSI drive because it will have at least fifty pins on the back of it.

IDE eye dee ee The drive interface that most Amigas now have. It can be recognised by its forty or forty-four pin interface.

MUI mooey Magic User Interface.

LhA ell aitch 'ay Popular archive format

LZX ell zed ecks A better compression format

DMS dee emm ess A format for compressing disk images.

GIF gif (like "gift" without the tee) An image format for dealing with images with eight bits of colour or fewer.

JPEG/JPG jaypeg Another image format, this time for working with 24-bit images.

IFF eye eff eff A popular misnomer for the native Amiga image format which should be ILBM.
PNG ping Another image format for dealing with image of 1-24 bits of colour. Designed to replace GIF and JPEG.

AGA 'ay gee 'ay All A1200s and A4000s have this graphics chipset.

Psion sion A manufacturer of rather neat palmtops and PDAs.

NTSC enn tee ess sea The American TV standard.


As I said, if there are any more you'd like to see, write in to the usual address with "pronunciation guide" on your envelope or the subject line of your email.

See you in four weeks...