Apple IIe - Manual (Page 45)

Page 45 of 74 IIe
Printed: Tuesday, March 4, 2003 10:40:15 AM
For students, a plotter can reproduce drawings and geometric designs created with the
programming language Logo.
For businessmen, a plotter can reproduce graphs and charts created
with business graphics software for use in reports and presentations. For engineers and
architects, a plotter can reproduce the three-dimensional drawings created with CAD
(computer-aided design) software for designing cars, circuit boards, buildings, and any other
kind of product.
Disk Drives
You must have at least one disk drive to use your computer for anything but simple BASIC
programming.
And it's convenient to have a second disk drive so that you can keep your
application program disk in drive 1 and your data disk in drive 2. (A few programs require you
to have two disk drives.) If you have an Apple DuoDisk attached to your Apple IIe, you have
two disk drives in one case. The drive on the left is drive 1; the drive on the right is drive
2.
Having two disk drives also makes it easier to make copies of data disks a must, since disks
are perishable.
You can attach up to six disk drives to your Apple IIe (but four is the maximum recommended).
The more disk drives you have, the more information is accessible to the computer (when
information is accessible to the computer it's said to be on-line).
But if you need to work
with a lot of information at one time, you should consider getting a mass storage device, like
the ProFile.
Tape Storage:
Before disk drives were available for the Apple II, programs had to be loaded from and saved
onto cassette tape using a standard tape recorder.
It's slow and complicated, compared to
saving and loading from disks, but it's still possible to use cassette tape for storage.
(You'll notice that there are input and output jacks with cassette icons on the back panel of
your Apple IIe.)
If you want to use tape for storage, ask your dealer for details or read the
relevant sections in the Apple IIe Technical Reference Manual.
ProFile
If you plan to use your Apple IIe for data base applications or other applications that involve
large amounts of data, you might want to invest in a mass storage device like the Apple
ProFile.
The ProFile can store the equivalent of dozens of floppy disks. It's a fast and
convenient way to get at your data. The ProFile stores all of your data on a pair of hard
disks sealed inside a box that sits neatly on top of your computer.
In addition to storing your data on a ProFile, you can get a program manager, like Catalyst
from Quark, that lets you store your application programs on the ProFile and access them from a
menu.
Once your application programs are on the ProFile, you can switch from program to
program by selecting from the program manager's menu rather than by swapping program disks and
restarting the computer.
Mouse
The mouse is a tool for communicating with the computer. When you move the mouse across your
desktop, a pointer moves in a corresponding direction across the screen. You can use the mouse
to move chunks of text from one place in a document to another, to select from lists, and to
create charts and other graphics.
Before the mouse came along, the main way to communicate with a computer program was by typing
commands at the keyboard.
The mouse lets you communicate with programs in a more intuitive