Icon – sadly I've not achieved this status, yet
Don’t expect Marilyn Munroe or Brad Pitt to appear on your screen. It’ll more likely be a boring little bitmap used to enable you to identify a function, like a printer or a knife. Don’t you think that it’s quite interesting though that most programs still use an icon of a floppy disk to represent the save function? When did you last use a floppy disk? Come on guys – get up to speed.

Imposition – most unwelcome
Design aficionados talk to printers about imposition, which is the process of describing how pages will be laid out for printing so that they all end up in the right order when the printed sheets are folded. Get that wrong and you’ll end up with a puzzle book.

Intel™ – don’t you just hate that jingle, inside?
Have you got an 8086 or a double em, ex, or a Pentium something or other. Oh, who cares. As long as it works.

Internet – thank goodness for the Cold War
We should all stand a beer for Tim Berners-Lee, the inspired Anglo Saxon who flushed the information Dark Ages down the loo when he invented the World Wide Web in 1991 (was it really only as recently as that?). Where would we be without his conversion of a subversive military computer network into a pervasive web of interconnected enlightened PC (and of course Mac) users? Probably enjoying ourselves down the pub like we used to do in the Dark Ages. That’s progress for you.

IP address – not one for your postman
Your unique 32-bit number that identifies your connection to a network like the Internet. In order to try and bluff us that they are actually human, the techies who dream all this stuff up have cloaked your address with letters and words nowadays. I think I’d prefer a nice brightly coloured scented envelope, like the good old days. Ah.

Intranet – introspective weaving
An intranet is like the Internet imploded in on itself. It’s really just a private network of computers sharing information that none of the rest of us nosey so and so’s can get a look at. But isn’t that just how the Internet started life?

JavaScript™– making life way way more interesting
We’d all be picking our noses by now if all we could see when we surfed the web were boring static words. Along came Java Esq and with a wave of his mouse’s tail provided our browsers with a nice little program that allows us to see those cute little animations, and even fill out forms. Now that’s cool.

Jitter – bug
Your monitor can act almost human sometimes when it suddenly manifests itself with tiny and extremely annoying movements of the characters displayed. You can get a spray at any garden centre . . .

Joystick - . . . . .
No, even I wouldn’t dare to define this one. And did you know there’s a term that refers to a ‘joystick port’? Let’s move swiftly on.

JPEG™ – useful if you live near the sewage works
A group of very clever individuals who had a mutual interest in photography got together one day to see how they could get the wired-up world to see their lovely pictures. What they came up with was a way of compressing images using algorithms, and thank goodness for that. The same goes for MPEG motion images. And ‘JPEG’? Joint Photographic Experts Group.

KB – a few little bytes
The poor cousin to old GB but when it comes to the web much more of a buddy. Online the smaller the KB the happier the surfers are, provided no sharks are about that is.

Kern – let's all squeeze in together
Sometimes the font you’re using has a bad hair day, and no matter what our creative genius does on screen, those letters just don’t sit together neatly enough. That’s where old kern comes in and allows pairs of letters to be set closer together. Not to be confused with kernel who’s as bossy as his human namesake and is responsible for triggering basic operations on your computer, like loading a program or displaying text on screen.