Internet glossary

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Ga - Chat shorthand for "go ahead", frequently used to signify that the person is through typing.

Gateway - The technical meaning is a hardware or software set-up that translates between two dissimilar protocols, for example America Online has a gateway that translates between its internal, proprietary e-mail format and Internet e-mail format. Another, sloppier meaning of gateway is to describe any mechanism for providing access to another system, e.g. AOL might be called a gateway to the Internet.

GIF (Graphic Interchange Format) - A common format for image files, especially suitable for images containing large areas of the same color. GIF format files of simple images are often smaller than the same file would be if stored in JPEG format, but GIF format does not store photographic images as well as JPEG.

Gigabyte - 1000 or 1024 Megabytes, depending on who is measuring. Internet glossary.

GMT - Greenwich Mean Time, often used as a standard time zone. In e-mail headers, you will often see references to the hours offset from GMT. For example, Eastern Standard Time is GMT minus 5 hours because of the 5 hour difference between Greenwich, England and the Eastern US.

Gopher - Invented at the University of Minnesota in 1993 just before the Web, gopher was a widely successful method of making menus of material available over the Internet. Gopher was designed to be much easier to use than FTP, while still using a text-only interface. Gopher is a Client and Server style program, whichrequires that the user have a Gopher Client program. Although Gopher spread rapidly across the globe in only a couple of years, it has been largely supplanted by Hypertext, also known as WWW (World Wide Web). There are still thousands of Gopher Servers on the Internet and we can expect they will remain for a while. Internet glossary.

Griefer - An online game role player who sabotages the game by harassing, deceiving, cheating, robbing or killing newer players.

GUI - Graphical User Interface. Pronounced "gooey". An operating system interace between the user and the computer based on graphics. GUIs typically use a mouse or other tracking device and icons. First developed by XEROX as an easier to learn interface than text-based ones, it was adopted by Apple for the Macintosh, Microsoft for Windows, and even for unix systems as XWindows.

GUID - Globally Unique Identifier. A controversial 16-byte number generated by Microsoft programs that uniquely identifies a network or user or computer or document. It is one of the elements of information that can be passed when you connect to an Internet site, and it may be stored in cookies.