Definition of Memory

Memory

Memory, or random access memory (RAM), is a special part of your computer that is designed to hold
temporary information. It’s very fast, but it’s also volatile—it goes away when you turn off the computer or when battery power is removed. Whatever a program is doing at any given moment needs to be tracked in memory. Managing memory is one of the OS’s most important jobs.

Sometimes it seems like we shouldn’t have to worry about memory anymore. I remember how
proud I was when I upgraded the first computer I ever personally owned to 640KB of memory, and
right now I’m typing on a computer with 512MB of memory.That’s 1,000 times as much memory as
my first computer, but my current computer is certainly not 1,000 times faster or more efficient or
useful than that first one. (Heck, with my constant Internet connection, this computer probably makes
me much less efficient.) But the more memory we have accessible to us, the more developers are
going to write programs that use a lot of memory. No matter how much space you have, your programs
may end up using it all. So it’s very important for the operating system to manage memory as
quickly and as efficiently as it possibly can.