Monday, April 9, 2001		Bits & Bytes

Binary format: A format for representing data used by some applications. The other main formats for storing data are text formats (such as ASCII and EBCDIC), in which each character of data is assigned a specific code number. Binary formats are used for executable programs and numeric data, whereas text formats are used for textual data. Many files contain a combination of binary and text formats. Such files are usually considered to be binary files even though they contain some data in a text format.

Diskette: A soft magnetic disk. It is called floppy because it flops if you wave it (at least, the 5¼-inch variety does). Unlike most hard disks, floppy disks (often called floppies or diskettes) are portable, because you can remove them from a disk drive. Disk drives for floppy disks are called floppy drives. Floppy disks are slower to access than hard disks and have less storage capacity, but they are much less expensive. And most importantly, they are portable.

Editor: Sometimes called text editor, a program that enables you to create and edit text files. There are many different types of editors, but they all fall into two general categories — line editor that is a primitive form of editor that requires you to specify a specific line of text before you can make changes to it and screen -oriented editors that are also called full-screen editors. These enable you to modify any text that appears on the display screen by moving the cursor to the desired location.