wow! great to meet curious person :)
Oboard FDC - Floppy Disk/Drive Controller - this thing controls your floppy drive. Why Onboard? Because in old XT and some 286/386 PCs was no integrated support for harddrives, floppies, printers, mouses and so on. Onboard means that you have it on your motherboard.
next one. S.M.A.R.T - Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology. Most modern hard drives can report additional information about their status. And if your BIOS supports this, it can read all this and warn you, if you have problem. There are some programs that will show you this information. It includes perfomance, spin up time, read error rate, seek error rate, CRC errors and many other characteristics. Basing on those knowledge you can predict how long will you hard drive work.
and now about printer modes. SPP - Standard Parallel Port. This is old Centronix standard. EPP - Enhanced Parallel Port and ECP - Extended Capabilities Port. Main difference between SPP and EPP/ECP is that SPP was able to tranfer data in only one dierction - to printer, but in EPP/ECP port can transfer info in both directions so you can read additional status from printer and you can build faster network based on printer port.
EPP was introduced by Xircom and Zenith Data Systems. It is much faster than SPP. ECP was introduced later by Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft and it have even more features. It may be even faster than EPP under Windows because it uses DMA mode, it uses internal FIFO buffers to tranfer data, it also does RLE compression during transmission up to 64:1, so it's really good for use with scanners. and last feature is channels. you maybe seen such thing as Hewlett-Packard 1100 Printer+Scanner+Copier device in one.All those parts have channel number. and even if buffer for printer is full you still can communicate with scanner.
I think I'm near message size limit. see next comment...
