A policy of the United States government of allowing strong encryption technology to be exported pending the approval of the Commerce Department and under the condition that the company exporting the technology offer a third key to the government. Some United States companies have agreed to participate in the key escrow system. They include Ascend Communications, Cisco Systems Inc., 3Com Corporation, Hewlett-Packard Company, Nortel Networks, Novell Inc., and Sun Microsystems Inc., all members of the Alliance for Network Security.

Software that changes a scalable font into a bitmap on the spot when needed in order to display the font onscreen or print the characters. TrueType and Adobe Type Manager are examples.

Telephony Application Programming Interface. A programming interface that allows PCs to interact with telephone and voice services, developed by Microsoft and Intel.

A communications control unit which is operated exclusively by instructions programmed into the computer to which it is connected. It does not have its own internal control programs.

A device that finds the best path for a data packet to be sent from one network to another. A router stores and forwards electronic messages between networks, first determining all possible paths to the destination address and then picking the most expedient route, based on the traffic load and the number of hops. A router works at the network layer (layer 3 of the OSI model); a bridge works at the data link layer (layer 2). A router does more processing than a bridge does. A router can be hardware or a combination of hardware and software.