Texas Instruments TI-99/4A - Page 182

DISK SOFTWARE
Floppy disks for your TI-99/4A are S'A-inch, flat,
flexible magnetic disks with protective jackets.
They look something like 45 RPM records. You
can buy disks with programs written on them, or
you can buy blank disks. The disks themselves,
and even some of the disk software, are not too
expensive, but to use them you have to have a
disk
drive—and that is not cheap.
There are notable advantages to using disk soft
ware, however. The same program that takes
five minutes to load into the computer from a
cassette will be loaded in seconds when using
a disk drive. In
addition to the advantage of
speed, disk drives also provide flexibifity in the
way that the computer uses information; be
cause the disk drive uses a recording method
known as random access, it is possible for the
disk drive to locate a given bit of information
(data) in a short time. Bycomparison, if that
same bit of information is recorded at the end of
a cassette, your computer must load the con
tents of the entire cassette into memory before
the needed information is found.
The initial cost of the disk drive is the primary
disadvantage of disk software, but if you pur
chase a disk drive, you will find a variety of
advanced software, such as many business ap
plications, available on floppy disks.
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