And EPROM was even worse. If it’s Erasable and Programmable, how is it also Read Only? You just said it can be changed!
Oh, yes, it can. The ridiculous 2Gb “RAM” laptop that I mentioned up-thread thrashes continuously just trying to run Windows and IE (plus the various security background processes the company has added).
Older PCs didn’t support virtual memory even though commercial computers did by then. In particular, the CPU support (basically an interrupt I think) wasn’t added to Intel chips until the later 386 models (again going by memory here). Windows OSes added virtual memory support sometime after that.
RAM is one of those words that is both well known enough to be understood, but technical enough to make it sound like you know what you are talking about.
It’s also useful when talking about smartphones, as people will also use it to refer to the flash memory.
That one’s easy. With EPROM, the computer you use it in can’t erase or program it. As far as the computer is concerned, you can only read it.
Where it starts to get murky is EEPROM, or Electrically Erasable and Programmable Read Only Memory. That actually allows you to send a signal to erase it and another signal to write it. The main reason it’s still called ROM is because the number of times it can be written was so small that you used it like ROM expect is certain circumstances.
Then you get into Flash memory, which is technically a form of EEPROM that allows more than one byte to be written at once. But because it’s used for basic storage, we no longer call it ROM.
Then there was the PROMQUEEN.
You really know your computer is thrashing when your washing machine sized disk drive starts shaking back and forth.
When I was at Illinois thrashing also referred to the state you get in when you have so many things to do that you switch from one to another without getting anything done. I think this meaning is in or was in the Hacker’s Dictionary at one point.
Here it is.
Doing a search for ram at either Newegg or Amazon turns up loads of pages of RAM, some of it labelled ‘RAM’ and some labelled Memory. Some of it is labelled as Memory and then specifies that it’s SDRAM. So you can still actually find the stuff by using the acronym.
It’s probably a marketing decision, I would guess. RAM is jargon. Memory is a familiar English word. Also, emphasizing that this stuff is Memory might cut down on the people who buy hard drives when they hear that they need more memory. If they search for memory, and it brings up a page of RAM, all of it labelled ‘memory’, it might be easier for non-tech people to feel confident enough to buy it.
There’s loads of studies done on which search terms get used. I would assume that Amazon and Newegg have both looked into this.
But I don’t believe that calling it RAM is outdated among actual technical professionals.
it has to do with how it operates. the contents of RAM are constantly being read, written, and erased as a matter of course while the equipment is operating. it’s “volatile” storage, power goes away, contents are lost. PROMs are meant to be erased/written to in one fell swoop, and during the normal operation of the machine it’s only to be read from.
One application of EEPROMS is collecting status data for large systems. An entry is written whenever the machine is power cycled, whenever there is a major error, and things like voltage is sampled periodically. Also stores are the ids of certain large chips in the system, and when boards are swapped. With permission of the customer this information is transmitted home to a database.
This isn’t done for PCs, it is done for high availability servers.