VECTOR
GRAPIUC,INC.
Booting requires
no
complicated action on your part.
You
need only determine
whether your system uses a hard or a
floppy disk, and press
[F]
to
boot
from
the
floppy, [Wl
to
boot
from
the
hard disk. (The [W]stands for Winchester,
the style of the disk used
in
your Vector 4, so the
letter
makes a
little
sense
after
all.)
The
IDee1ronie
Fne
Cabjnet
The work you do
with
your Vector 4 will consist of manipulating
data
stored
in individually-accessed areas
of
the disk called
f.ilD..
A file in the computer
is a collection
Of
data
under a given name; like the office
fUe
for which
it
is
named,
it
is stored in the same place, which implies
some
relation between
the
elements.
AU
information stored in mass
memory
is kept
in
some type of
fUe.
There
are
two basic types of files: program files
and
data files. Program files
contain
instructions
for
the
computer;
the
transient
commands
already
mentioned
are
examples of program
files.
Program
files
are
generally
not
changeable
without
the
assistance of a skilled programmer.··
You
will use the
program files to move, copy, rename, delete, change the
status
of,
and
check
on
the other type:
data
files.
Data
files
contain
information which you wish
to
store or process
in
some
way, such
as
a
list
of customers
who
have purchased a
certain
product,
or
a
letter
to
a vendor regarding purchasing supplies.
What
you
put into a data
file
is
up to you, and the program you choose
to
run.
How
it
gets
there
is
up
to
Vee
tor 4 CP/M.
The
first
step
in file storage is the selection, by
you,
of a disk drive.
When
you
boot, the screen shows the
A>
prompt. This indicates that your V ec
tor.
4
is
currently addressing Drive
A.
The A drive is said to be "logged in". '
To move
to
another
drive,
just
enter the
letter
of the drive, a colon, and a
(RETURN].
To
allow
you
to expand your storage, Extended CP
1M
is
capable
of
reading
from as
many
as
16 drives, given· the letters A through P as their
names.
To
determine
how
many
drives your system supports,
see
the
CONFIG
F option, explained under Vector 4
CP/M
Transient
Commands.
As
you
enter information to the logged-in drive,
CP/M
keeps track of the
data
in
the
RAM
by
using "records"
made
up
of 128 bytes (the computer term for a
character.)
When
you
want to copy this
data
to the disk, the compu
tersends
each
record
off
to
the Basic Disk Operating System
(BOOS),
which "writes"
it
onto the current disk or diskette. But a single record
takes
up too small an
area;
.
it
would
be impractically slow for the
BOOS
to search through every 128
bytes when
it
had to copy large quantities of
data.
So
Vector
4 CP/M uses
several larger divisions
to
make its file management faster.
VU-12
7100-0001 9-01-82 - Rev. A
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