Word: disks
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Closest to home -- in the Milky Way itself -- Cornell and Caltech astronomers have found what may be the early stages in the formation of a new solar system, showing for the first time that a dust disk surrounding a sun- size star orbits the star in an orderly fashion. Such disks, initially found in the early 1980s, have been touted as the precursors of planetary systems. This discovery makes the claim a notch less speculative and suggests that stars with planets may be quite common...
...user can instruct the computer to take its commands from a pre-arranged file. For example, when the Happy Hacker wants to use DBASE, he simply types in db at the A prompt. This instructs the computer to execute all of the commands in the file DB.BAT stored on disk. Upon looking at the Hacker's DB.BAT file, the IBM compatible then knows to do the following things. Load in Sidekick (a handy calculator/notepad utility), create a ramdisk, activate a print spooling utility, switch to the Dbase subdirectory of the hard disk and start the DBASE program running...
...first turned on, or when it is reset, it will always look for a file called autoexec.bat. This is an ASCII file (constructed like any other batch file) which tells a computer what to do before leaving the user at the A prompt. For users without a hard disk, the autoexec.bat file can be used to start up specific applications. For example, the Happy Hacker has a wordprocessing disk that will always load a spelling checker program and then start the word processor anytime the computer is reset with the disk in drive...
Users with hard disks might have several useful utility programs, such as print spoolers or spelling checkers, automatically loaded every time they boot up. The Happy Hacker uses his hard disk's autoexec.bat file to perform several functions. After checking a calendar program to see if it's a friend's or relative's birthday, loading in a ramdisk and copying certain files to it, installing a utility which blanks the screen after five minutes of non-use, and finally printing a quote of the day (drawn from a very large database), the Happy Hacker finally has control...
This type of programming also gives thestation's disk jockeys a chance to play somethingdifferent. Last year, the rock department produceda Bruce Springsteen orgy, even though the stationrarely plays the Boss...