| A | B |
| Expansion bus | part of the system board that uses a different set of physical wires |
| riser card | mounted perpendicular to a system board |
| PC bus | the first standard expansion bus created by IBM in 1984 |
| ISA | Industry Standard Architecture |
| MCA | Micro Channel Architecture |
| EISA | Extended Industry Standard Association |
| VESA | Video Electronics Standard Association |
| PCI | Peripheral Component Interconnect |
| plug and play | allows certain operating systems to assign necessary settings to devices based on available system resources |
| AGP | Accelerated graphics port |
| PCMCIA | Personal Computer Memory Card International Association |
| Hot swappable | can be removed and a new one inserted without rebooting the computer |
| USB | Universal serial bus |
| DRAM | Dynamic Random Access Memory |
| SRAM | Static Random Access Memory |
| DIP | Dual in-line package |
| DIMM | Dual in-line memory module |
| SIMM | Single in-line memory module |
| chip creep | when chip works its way out of slot due to heating and cooling |