PASCAL
Appendix B
INTRODUCTION TO TILE PASCAL OPERATING SYSTEM
The ThinkTank program is written in a language called PASCAL and runs under the PASCAL (or
in using ThinkTank you will sometimes encounter it. This appendix tells you what to expect.
WHAT IS AN OPERATING SYSTEM?
Think of an operating system as the executive director of your computer. It receives your commands, communicates between your computer and your program, and manages the files in which your information is stored. When ThinkTank stores an outline on a disk, it is actually the operating system that does the work; ThinkTank merely tells it what to do.
FILES
When you want to store information in your office or home for a long period of time, you probably put it in a file and put the file in a file cabinet. The same is true of a com- puter, only the files are magnetically encoded and the cabinet is called a disk. Like a file cabinet, the capacity of a disk is large but not unlimited. ThinkTank only alloys you to
store one ThinkTank outline file on a floppy disk. That way
the outline can expand to fill the whole disk if necessary, much as a paper file might expand to fill an entire cabinet. On a hard disk you can store as many outline files as will fit.
Every PASCAL file has a name by which you can refer to it. If you have a