Using The Disk Drive - Canon Cat Reference Manual

Using the Disk
Drive
The
Cat has
two
storage
places for your text: memory and
disk.
Memory is the
area
inside the Cat where the text is
stored
while you
are
working on it. The on-screen text
is
a
portion of
the
text
stored
in
memory.
The
memory
is
kept
alive by
the
electric
current
coming from
the
wall. If
the
power
were
cut,
the
text in
the
memory would
be
lost,
so
you
need !o
record
the
text
more or less
permanently
on
a
disk
with
the
help of
the
disk drive.
One command,
[DISK],
handles
all
operations
involving
disk
and
memory.
When
you
use [DISK], the Cat does one
of three things:
-
Plays backthe disk
in the
drive. This
means
copying the
information
from
the
disk into
the
memory,
and
putting
a
portion of it
up on the screen
where you
can
see
it
and
work
on
it.
-Records
the text
in
memory. This
means
transferring
the
information in memory to
the
disk for
safe storage.
-Beeps.
This
means the Cat makes
a
warning
sound and
does
nothing,
because
recording
or playing
back might
lose
information.
A DISK
sign appears on the
ruler while
the Cat is
record-
ing
or
playing
back.
The Happy
Cursor
After recording
or
playing back your text,
the
Cat's cursor
blinks
at a
faster
rate. This is called
the happy
cursor.
A
happy
cursor means that the
text
on the screen is
safe: there
is
no
difference between the text recorded on
the
disk and
the text
held
in
the
Cat's memory.
If
you
type
or
erase something, the cursor begins
to
blink
at
a
slower rate. The slower cursor indicates that you have
made changes
to
the
text and those changes have not been
recorded on
disk.
Clean Text,
Dirty
Text
When the cursor is happy,
we
say the text
in memory
is
cleqn. Clean means unchanged.
When the cursor blinks
slowly,
the
text is
called
dirty,
which
means the
text
has
been changed but not recorded on disk.