The terms were originally coined to refer to types of tv broadcasts. In Europe, their color televisions were 576i (as opposed to north america, where standard televisions are 480i. Basically, PAL is a color encoding system that was used for european tv's, while NTSC was used for north/central america and japan, I believe.
PAL stands for Phase Alternating Line, and NTSC was named after the National Television Standards Committee.
Nowadays, when you hear PAL and NTSC, they are more often than not referring to the geographical areas which PAL and NTSC were representing.
What you need to know is that PAL is for Europe, and NTSC for most everything else.
