Multimedia Glossary: N

National Center for Supercomputer Applications

See NCSA

National Televisions Standards Committee

See NTSC

NCSA

National Center for Supercomputer Applications

The NCSA is located at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign). The first widely popular browser, called Mosaic, was developed there by Marc Andreessen.
The NCSA developed software, written by K Hughes, that runs image maps. This software is called imagemap.

Network File System

See NFS

Network Information System

See NIS

Network Interface Card

See NIC

Network News Transport Protocol

See NNTP

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news

Usenet / newsgroup / netnews

This method is used for the bulletin board kind of service originally called Usenet, but nowadays commonly referred to as Newsgroups. News runs on the NNTP protocol.

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NFS

Network File System

NFS is a distributed file system (a protocol suite) that allows a user to access a remote file as if it is in the local hard drive. NFS provides an upper layer file system service. On the lower level it uses TCP/Ip for transport. NFS was originally developed by Sun Microsystems and consists of three protocols:

• NFS: Network File System
• XDR: eXternal Data Representation
• RPC: Remote Procedure Call

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NIC

Network Interface Card

Network cards are plugged into computers and allow them to be connected to networks. Each manufactured card gets a globally unique number that allows computers to communicate with it. A software address can also be assigned to the card. This software address would typically be an IP address.

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NIS

Network Information System

An organization responsible for administering the Internet, TCP/IP addresses and domain names.

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NNTP

Network News Transport Protocol

The protocol used for the service originally called Usenet, but nowadays commonly referred to as Newsgroups. Usenet was developed in 1979 and standardized in 1983. Messages are stored in a database which holds them in groups of interest to which users can subscribe. The naming scheme is hierarchical. Pointing to a newsgroup from an HTML web page would look like this: news:za.travel.cape Today there are tens of thousands of newsgroups to which a user can belong. topics range from the sublime to the esoteric, from the useful to the useless, virtually anything under the sun that somebody thinks is worthwhile to discuss.

NTSC

National Televisions Standards Committee

an analogue video standard used in the United States of America and Japan. The frame rate is 30 frames per second (fps). SECAM scans the cathode ray tube (CRT) horizontally 525 times to form the video image.

Other standards are PAL and SECAM

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