Atari 400 User Manual page 226

this sort made for the Atari. It is much more like
a general ledger system than other programs.
The special reports and other features available
will most likely be of interest to those familiar
with accounting principles and practices. The
documentation is extensive and somewhat com -
plicated. A printer is almost a must here.
Recommended Data Base
Management Programs
In its most fundamental form, a data base is
simply a related collection of information. This
concept is best understood through use of the
following example.
Let's take a file card box with cooking recipes
stored in alphabetical order. All of the informa-
tion stored in the box is like a simple data base,
and the method used to organize the recipes
(file box, cards, and dividers) could be called a
Data Base Management System (DBMS for
short). The recipes are divided into general cate -
gories, such as vegetable appetizers, lamb
dishes, chocolate
desserts, etc. These categories
are called keys in the DBMS. In addition, each
card in the file contains one complete recipe,
which can be considered a record. The records
may be further subdivided into individual ingre-
dients, called fields.
If you actually kept those recipes in your com-
puter, you could ask the computer to look up all
the recipes in a particular category (key), for
instance, " Iamb dishes." The more advanced
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