GW-BASIC was a dialect of BASIC developed by Microsoft from BASICA, originally for Compaq. It is compatible with Microsoft/IBM BASICA, but was disk based and did not require the resources of the ROM included on IBM's machines. It was bundled with MS-DOS operating systems on IBM PC compatibles by Microsoft. Like other early microcomputer versions of BASIC, GW-BASIC lacked many of the structures needed for structured programming such as local variables, and GW-BASIC programs executed relatively slowly, due to the fact that it was an interpreted programming language. It did have a large number of graphics commands.

GNU zip (gzip) is a GNU free software file compression program. It was created by Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler. gzip is based on the DEFLATE algorithm, which is a combination of LZ77 and Huffman coding. DEFLATE was intended as a replacement for LZW and other patent-encumbered data compression algorithms which, at the time, limited the usability of compress and other popular archivers. "gzip" is often also used to refer to the gzip file format.

A graphical user interface lets users interact with their computer via icons and a pointer instead of by typing in text at a command line. Popular GUIs, such as Sun Microsystem's OpenWindows, Microsoft's Windows, and Apple's Mac OS, have freed many users from the command-line interfaces like MS-DOS.

A term used for items that look gray and inoperable to a user who tries to click on a the item to activate it or open a file or link. Programmers gray out the area and prevent the user from accessing what is behind the gray area.