Prep

Prep may refer to:

Preppy

Preppy or prep (all abbreviations of the word preparatory) refer to a subculture in the United States associated with the old private Northeastern university-preparatory schools. The terms are used to denote a person seen as characteristic of a student or alumnus of these schools.Prep has become a colloquialism in the United States and has largely replaced preppy in modern usage. Characteristics of preps in the past, include a particular subcultural speech, vocabulary, dress, mannerisms, etiquette, reflective of an upper-class upbringing.

Definition

The term preppy derives from the private, university-preparatory or prep schools that some American upper-class and upper-middle-class children attend. The term preppy is commonly associated with the Ivy League and oldest universities in the Northeast, since traditionally a primary goal in attending a prep school was admittance into one of these institutions. Preppy fashion derives from the fashions of these old Northeastern colleges in the early to mid-twentieth century. Lisa Birnbach's 1980 book Official Preppy Handbook, which was written to poke fun at the rich lives of privileged Ivy League and socially elite liberal arts college students but ended up glamorizing the culture, portrays the preppy social group as well-educated, well-connected, and although exclusive, courteous to other social groups without fostering serious relationships with them. Being well-educated and well-connected is associated with an upper-class socioeconomic status that emphasizes higher education and high-income professional success.

PowerPC Reference Platform

PowerPC Reference Platform (PReP) was a standard system architecture for PowerPC-based computer systems (as well as a reference implementation) developed at the same time as the PowerPC processor architecture. Published by IBM in 1994, it allowed hardware vendors to build a machine that could run various operating systems, including Windows NT, OS/2, Solaris, Taligent and AIX.

One of the stated goals of the PReP specification was to leverage standard PC hardware, and thus PReP was essentially a PC clone with a PowerPC CPU. Apple, wishing to seamlessly transition its Macintosh computers to PowerPC, found this to be particularly problematic. As it appeared no one was particularly happy with PReP, a new standard, the Common Hardware Reference Platform (CHRP), was developed and published in late 1995, incorporating the elements of both PReP and the Power Macintosh architecture. Key to CHRP was the requirement for Open Firmware (also required in PReP-compliant systems delivered after June 1, 1995), which gave vendors greatly improved support during the boot process, allowing the hardware to be far more varied.