PAL- Phase Alteration Line. The TV system used in the UK and many other countries that displays 625 lines on the screen, updating at a rate of 25 frames per second.

PARALLEL PORT- An I/O port that is used to connect the Amiga to other peripherals, such as printers or networking.

PARITY- Used to detect errors in transferring information via the serial port by attaching an extra bit of information to the data.

PARTITION- A section of the hard drive that is treated as an individual drive.

PATH- The devices and drawers that show the location of a particular file.

PATTERN MATCHING- Allows the user to search for a file by only displaying names that feature a particular sequence of characters, such as those ending with .IFF.

PAULA- One of the Amiga's custom chips, which handles sound (audio DAC's), 4703 custom interupt chip, serial chip and disk management.

PASSWORD- Generally an numer of alphanumberic characters required to gain access to part or the whole of the computer system.

PCB- Printed Circuit Board. The surface of the circuit board where everything is mounted.

PCMCIA- Stands for Personal Computer Memory Card International Association. A company that is attempting to regulate the use of the PCM (Personal Memory Card), as featured on the A600 and A1200. The Amiga does not use it for much except for storage of files and memory. But it has proven too slow for common use in this area. Most Amiga owners use it for CD-Drive, hard drive or SCSI interface.

PD- Public Domain. When programmers give up copyright of their software code allowing it to be copied and used in other programs. Also used in a general term to describe any freely copied software.

PERIPHERAL- An external piece of hardware.

PGA- Pin Gate Array. A method of mounting complex chips on to a PCB.

PHOTO CD- A standard set by Kodak to store photos on CD-ROM and manipulate them in your computer.

PITCH- The number of pixels that fit within a horizontal inch.

PIXEL- PIX (picture) ELement. A single square on the computer screen that, when combined with other pixels make an image.

PLANAR- A form of graphics used in systems with very little processing power or memory, such as the Amiga. The pixel's colour information is stored in several parts of the memory. This is mostly used for 2D games, but is too slow for 3D.

PLCC- PLastic Leadless Chip Carrier. A way of fitting chips with a number of connections onto a circuit board.

PNG- Portable Network Graphics. A standard graphics format, first implemented by Cloanto PPaint. It is designed to replace the GIF format.

POINTER- The graphical representation of the mouses movements on screen.

POSTSCRIPT PRINTER- A printer that accepts information to be printed in the PostScript programming language, providing a higher quality print.

PREFERENCES- A drawer that contains a number of programs to customise the Workbench environment.

PRINTER DRIVER- A program that translates the computers signal into a form that the computer can understand.

PROCESSOR- The main chip that has control over the computer. The Amiga uses the Motorola 680x0 and PowerPC series. It can also use an Intel or DEC Alpha CPU as a second processor for intensive tasks, such as rendering.

PROJECT- A data file that needs to be run through a particular program, such as pictures, sound samples or text.

PROTECTION BITS- See attributes.

PROTOCOL- A number of standards developed to govern the transfer of files and information.

PULL DOWN MENUS- The list of programs that are available from the title bar, activated by pressing the right mouse button.

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