control character
A special, non-printing character that begins, modifies, or ends a function, event, operation or control operation. The ASCII character set defines 32 control characters. Originally, these codes were designed to control teletype machines. Now, however, they are often used to control display monitors, printers, and other modern devices.
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- control panel
A Macintosh utility that permits you to set many of the system parameters. For example, you can control the type of beeps the Mac makes and the sensitivity of the mouse. On older Macs (System 6 and earlier), control panels are called cdevs. The Windows operating system has a Control Panel program that offers many […]
- control program
(1) A program that enhances an operating system by creating an environment in which you can run other programs. Control programs generally provide a graphical interface and enable you to run several programs at once in different windows. Control programs are also called operating environments. (2) Another term for operating system.
- controller
(k&n-trōl´er) (n.) A device that controls the transfer of data from a computer to a peripheral device and vice versa. For example, disk drives, display screens, keyboards, and printers all require controllers. In personal computers, the controllers are often single chips. When you purchase a computer, it comes with all the necessary controllers for standard […]
- controller area network
Abbreviated CAN, a serial bus network of microcontrollers that connects devices, sensors and actuators in a system or sub-system for real-time control applications. There is no addressing scheme used in controller area networks, as in the sense of conventional addressing in networks (such as Ethernet). Rather, messages are broadcast to all the nodes in the […]
- conventional memory
On DOS systems, conventional memory refers to the portion of memory that is available to standard DOS programs. DOS systems have an address space of 1MB (megabyte), but the top 384K (called upper memory) is reserved for system use. This leaves 640K of conventional memory. Everything above 1MB is either extended or expanded memory.