A loaf of bread, a gig of ram, and thou...

I don’t mean to go all nerdy on you, but I added a gig of ram this week. Not in the way this post’s title implies, that it is the main dish at some ongoing feast, but RAM, Random Access Memory. In my computer. A “gig” of it. Let me explain for the non-techie crowd, the uniniated, those of you who are still sane.

The computer basically has two states: off or on, no or yes, or as the mathematicians put it, zero or one. This is called binary arithmetic because it is based on only two possibilities, as opposed to decimal, which is based on ten, from our fingers. Each little bit of storage space that can contain a 0 or a 1 in a computer is called a “bit” (clever, huh?), which is short for “binary digit.” People figured out very quickly that this could soon become very unwieldy, so someone came up with a shorthand concept (a “bigger bucket,” if you will) called the byte, which consists of eight bits. (Years ago a byte contained only six bits, but never mind.) A thousand bytes is called a “K” and a million bytes is called a “Meg.” Well, not really. Actually, a K, or kilobyte, is 2 to the 10th power, or 1024 bytes, and a Meg, or megabyte, is 1024 times 1024 bytes, because everything in the computer is a power of 2, remember? The abbreviations “K” to mean a thousand and “M” to mean a million are just approximations for the general public (and have something to do with the ancient Greeks). With me so far? I will assume that glassy-eyed look is a yes.

Okay, class, so if K stands for a thousand bytes, more or less (that is, a kilobyte), and M stands for a million bytes, more or less, (that is, a megabyte), then what do you think a gigabyte might be? You there, in the back, did I see your hand raised?

That’s right, a gigabyte is a billion bytes (more or less), 1024 times 1 Meg, or 1 G, not to be confused with the gravitational pull astronauts experience when blasting into space from Cape Canaveral.

The main difference in my computer’s having 256 Meg of RAM, which it used to have, and having a Gig of RAM added this week (it now has 1.25 Gig of RAM--more or less) is speed. It used to take at least four minutes to boot up my computer and now it takes only a minute and twenty seconds. Everything, all day long, is significantly faster.

Ah, speed in the computer wilderness were paradise enow!

Next time, if there is a next time, we will discuss hexadecimal notation.