Monday, October 8, 2001		Bits & Bytes

SMDI: Pronounced smi-dee, an acronym for SCSI Musical Data Interchange. SMIDI is a data interchange standard originated in 1991 by Peavey Electronics that allows large amounts of musical data, such as digital audio files from a sampling keyboard, to be transferred over the SCSI at high speeds between products of different manufacturers. Compared to MIDI, SMDI is much faster.

Token passing: A type of CAM. Token passing uses a token, or series of bits, to grant a device permission to transmit over the network. Whichever device has the token can put data into the network. When its transmission is complete, the device passes the token along to the next device in the topology.

AES: Short for Advanced Encryption Standard, a symmetric 128-bit block data encryption technique developed by Belgian cryptographers Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen. The US government adopted the algorithm as its encryption technique in October 2000, replacing the DES encryption it used. AES works at multiple network layers simultaneously. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) of the U.S. Department of Commerce selected the algorithm, called Rijndael (pronounced Rhine Dahl or Rain Doll), out of a group of five algorithms under consideration, including one called MARS from a large research team at IBM.