When I was first learning about computers back in junior high school, we were taught what RAM stood for – Random Access Memory – but not what it did. It wasn’t until I started developing a more intimate knowledge of the inner workings of a computer that I came to grok its purpose. Unfortunately, the vast majority of computer users won’t acquire enough knowledge to understand the idea of RAM.
Due to the same naive ignorance, I was also often confused about the concepts of “memory” and “storage”. To me, they were interchangeable. A hard drive was a kind of memory, right? But again, it wasn’t until I learned more about computers that I understood the distinction. Without a certain degree of knowledge and familiarity, these concepts can be confusing.
So, whenever I have to explain what RAM does versus what the hard drive does, I use the analogy of short-term and long-term memory.
For your computer, RAM (memory) acts like your own short-term memory. It keeps track of what you’re doing at the moment; what programs you have running. Your hard drive (storage) acts like your long-term memory. It remembers who you are (operating system) and what you know (data).
Just as your brain can pass information from your short-term memory to your long-term, so can your computer. For example, lets say you receive someone’s electronic business card in an email. When you open it, your RAM (short-term) keeps track of it, remembers that you have it open and what data is in it. When you save it to your hard drive (long-term) you now have that information available for retrieval in the future. In a real world sense, this would be like meeting someone; when they tell you their name, you hold it in short-term memory for quick access, but it also gets transferred to your long-term memory so that you’ll be able to remember their name five days later.
Make sense?
Now I know this isn’t a perfect analogy, but it seems to make sense to most people. Thoughts?
I love tech, but don’t have as much time or money to spend on it as I’d like. I get what I need to sustain my Geek vicariously through other sources and pass it along to you.
