A method of software-development that groups related functions and data into reusable chunks. Properly handled, object-oriented programming can reduce development time on new projects.
OCR (Optical Character Recognition)
When your computer gets a fax or scans in text, all it sees are graphical bits on a virtual page. That text is not usable, searchable, or editable. If you pass the page through an OCR program, the software converts the shapes on it into a text document. However, few documents are perfectly recognized and the errors are frequent if the type is small or the scan unclear. But the conversion is often faster than typing text manually.
Optical fiber
Optical fiber cables consist of thin filaments of glass (or other transparent materials), which can carry beams of light. A laser transmitter encodes frequency signals into pulses of light and sends them down the optical fiber to a receiver, which translates the light signals back into frequencies. Less susceptible to noise and interference than other kinds of cables, optical fibers can transmit data greater distances without amplification. But because the glass filaments are fragile, optical fiber must be run underground rather than overhead on telephone poles.
OS (operating system)
A computer by itself is essentially dumb bits of wire and silicon. An operating system knows how to talk to this hardware and can manage a computer's functions, such as allocating memory, scheduling tasks, accessing disk drives, and supplying a user interface. Without an operating system, software developers would have to write programs that directly accessed hardware--essentially reinventing the wheel with every new program. With an operating system, such as Windows NT or Mac OS 8, developers can write to a common set of programming interfaces called APIs and let the operating system do the dirty work of talking to the hardware.
