A may refer to any of the following:
- A: is a physical drive on older PC or IBM compatible computers. The A: drive denotes the 3.5-inch or 5.25-inch floppy disk drive and is often configured in BIOS setup as the first bootable drive on IBM-compatible computers.
- How to enter and exit the BIOS or CMOS setup.
By having the drive as the first boot device, the computer can boot from a bootable floppy diskette to install an operating system and fix and repair a computer.
Today, the A: drive is obsolete and has been replaced by the CD-ROM and USB flash drives.
- In gaming, when using the WASD keys to control a character or another object, the “A” is the same as the left arrow key.
Related information
- Floppy drive help and support.
A* (pronounced “A-star”) is an algorithm for pathfinding and traversing a graph data structure. It was developed in 1968 by researchers at Stanford University and is widely used today―notably in computer games. When a video game character moves and navigates around obstacles or terrain, the A* algorithm was likely used to calculate the path.
A is a keyboard key used with the keyboard shortcuts Alt+A, Command+A, and Ctrl+A.
With Perl, \a is a bell or alarm. With a regular expression, \A matches the start of a multiline string.
On the keyboard LEDs, a square with the letter “A” indicates the Caps Lock on some keyboards.
With Microsoft Excel and other spreadsheet programs, “A” is the first column of a spreadsheet. To reference the first cell in the column, you’d use “A1.”
A lowercase a is the SI-derived symbol of the atto- prefix.
In the phonetic alphabet, “A” is often pronounced as “alfa.”
A is the first letter of the English alphabet, followed by the letter “B.” To create a capitalized “A,” press Shift and A at the same time.
With U.S. QWERTY keyboards, the “A” key is on the home row, to the right of the Caps Lock key, and left of the “S” key. See our keyboard page for a visual example of all keyboard keys.
B:, C:, Computer abbreviations, D:, Drive letter, Floppy drive, Floppy drive terms, Letter
If the “A” key is not working on the keyboard, see: Some keys on my computer keyboard aren’t working.
In ASCII, the uppercase “A” is “065” in decimal (01000001 in binary). The lowercase “a” is “097” in decimal (01100001 in binary).
Doing the Alt code Alt+65 creates a capital “A” and Alt+97 creates a lowercase “a” character.
The number 2 on a phone keypad is used to create an “A” on a US phone.
- See our A terms for a full listing of computer terms starting with “A.”
- Computer people and pioneers with “A” first names.
