Commodore 1541-II - Introduction to the Commodore 1541 Disk Drive; Advantages of Disk Drive Usage; Key Features of the 1541

INTRODUCTION
The 1541 disk drive greatly increases the speed, storage capacity, flexibility and reliabil
ity of your Commodore computer. As you use the 1541 disk drive, you will appreciate its
superiority to the cassette recorder you may have used before and to disk drives offered for
other brands of computers.
The 1541-n disk drive is fully compatible with the commodore 1541 disk drive, therefore
we may often omit the "-II" suffix throughout the remainder of this manual.
THE ADVANTAGES OF A DISK DRIVE
• Speed
If you have used a cassette recorder for data storage, you probably know it can take up
to an hour just to search one long cassette tape looking for a specific program. With the
1541 disk drive, a list of all the programs on a diskette appears on your screen in
seconds. The speed of program loading is also greatly improved. It takes the 1541 only
a minute to load a large program that would take a half-hour to load from tape.
• Reliability
Reliability is another reason for choosing a disk drive. It is all too common for a cassette
user to accidentally erase a valuable program by saving a new program on top of the old
one, without realizing it. The 1541 disk drive automatically verifies everything it
records.
• Direct File Access
A third advantage of a disk drive is the ability to use relative files (discussed in Chapter
6). On a diskette, any part of a relative file can be accessed and altered separately,
without affecting the rest of the file.
Overall, using a disk drive makes for easier and more powerful computing.
FEATURES OF THE 1541
The 1541 is one of the most affordable disk drives on the market. Compared to
competitors, the 1541 has high capacity, and even higher intelligence. It is one of the most
cost-effective disk drives available. Most home and personal computers that use a disk
take at least 10K of RAM memory from the computer to hold a disk operating system
(known as a DOS.) This large program must be in memory the whole time the disk is
being used, and much of it must also be kept on every diskette.
The Commodore 1541 works differently and more effectively. It contains its own
built-in microcomputer to control its various operations, along with enough ROM and
RAM memory to operate without any help from the computer. Commodore's DOS
"lives" entirely inside the disk drive, and does not require any internal memory in the
computer to do its work, nor does it have to be loaded before use like DOS on other
computers. It is so independent that once it begins working on a command, it will
complete it while the computer goes on to some other task, effectively allowing you to do
two things at once.