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When you save a document in Microsoft Word, it asks you to give a name for that document. When you do so, a new file is created with that name. Generally, the default location for such files is on the hard drive. Most computers have a hard drive (or hard disk) that serves as the storage location for everything on the computer. When you turn off the computer, anything saved to the hard drive will still be there. However, if you don't save your work, then it's only in the memory (RAM, or random access memory) of the computer, and when the computer is shut down, the memory is wiped clean and whatever was in it is lost.
I'll give you an analogy that might help you understand this better. Say you're working in an office, and you have a desk and a file cabinet. In order to do your job, you get files out of the file cabinet and put them on your desk to work on them. The file cabinet could vary in size, but even if it's a small one, it still holds many more files than the number that can fit on your desk. So, the working space on your desk is limited, and if you get too many files out, you have to put some back into the file cabinet in order to have enough room on the desk to do your work. The file cabinet is like the hard drive, and the desk is like the computer's memory (or RAM). The computer generally has much more space on the hard drive than in memory. In fact, nowadays most computers' hard drives are measured in gigabytes (billions of bytes, and GB for short), whereas memory is still measured in megabytes (millions of bytes, or MB).
On most computers, the hard drive is (by default) the C drive. In Windows, you can go up to My Computer (look for it on the desktop) and double-click on it to look at all the different drives on the computer. Some computers may have multiple hard drives. The letter for a computer's CD drive will vary greatly, but the floppy drive is usually the A drive. The floppy drive is for floppy disks. You know, those little 3.5-inch diskettes that you can save stuff onto and carry around from computer to computer. If you want to see how much space is used and how much is free on a drive, you can usually just click on it. If a diagram doesn't appear to the left showing you how much of the drive is full and free, then right-click on the drive, and choose to see the Properties. Note: a floppy disk can hold 1.44 MB of data, and these days that's not so much. For instance, most MP3s are over 3-4 MB! Of course, you can still fit a large number of text files onto a disk. Also, keep in mind that floppy disks are pretty slow to read from and write to. If you ever try to open a file from a floppy disk, it's usually a good idea to drag it to the Desktop first (this copies the file from the floppy to the computer's Desktop folder/directory on the hard drive), because that will save you a lot of time.
Now, if you're on any of the Windows machines on campus (and I'm defining a Windows machine as any computer that's running Microsoft Windows), then you'll see another drive in the My Computer folder. It's called the U drive, and it's your personal account on Owlnet. All of the computers on campus are networked together, and all students have personal accounts on Owlnet, one of the networks at Rice. Student Owlnet accounts are now much larger than they were last fall: 100 MB or more. If you save something on your U drive, then it's saved to a really big computer at Rice. Whenever you log into any Windows machine, it always connects to your Owlnet account, so no matter what Windows machine you're on, your U drive will always be connected to the same place. Try it and see: save a file on your U drive, and then go to another computer and open that file again.
By the way, people use the words "folder" and "directory" interchangeably. They're the same thing. You can create a folder/directory and save files in it. You can also create directories within directories. In Windows, all you have to do is right-click and go to New, and then choose Folder, and a folder icon will appear, and you can type in your name for the folder. Another thing you can try is copying and cutting and pasting files. Right-click on a file. If one isn't there, then right-click and go to New again. It should give you a bunch of different choices of what you want to create. You could choose to create a new text document, or a new folder. When you have created a file, right-click on it and go down to Copy, and then right-click somewhere else and click Paste. Now you have two copies of the same thing (they just can't have the exact same name). If you only want one copy (like if you were going to move a file from one folder to another, and you didn't want to leave a copy of the old one behind), then right-click on the file and go to Cut, and then click Paste where you want the file to be.
You may never ever log into a UNIX machine, but there are many on campus, so if you want to know about this, read on! When you log into a UNIX machine (most of them are Sun Workstations, because that's what Sun Microsystems calls them; we also call them Owlnet workstations/machines), then the file system you are working with is your Owlnet account (what was your U drive on Windows machines). You don't have access to any other hard drive or anything like that. If you create files, folders, etc, then you're saving them in your Owlnet directory, and so everything is being saved on some distant central computer's "really big hard drive".
Stephen Huey, 1/15/02