HP 3000 Manuals

Understanding Your System Concept Guide for the HP 3000 Series 9X7LX

Chapter 3  What Are Files? 

Programs take, send, record, and retrieve information.  From the
perspective of the computer, files are the only source and the only
destination for all of the information that the programs manage for you.

If you have kept records of any kind for any purpose, you have worked
with files.  Keeping related pieces of information together, in one
place, is a loose but workable definition of a file.

Computers, however, go beyond this loose definition of a file.  For the
computer, a file is the following:

   *   a collection of related pieces of information kept in a consistent
       form

   *   a source from which information is retrieved (a computer "reads" a
       file)

   *   a destination to which information is sent (a computer "writes" to
       a file)

MPE/iX 5.0 Documentation