CS Crash Course: #6 Registers and RAM

- Computer memory that only stores one bit of information isn't very useful, but we're not limited to using only one latch. If we put 8 latches side-by-side, we can store 8 bits of information like an 8-bit number. 

- A group of latches operating like this is called a register, which holds a single number, and the number of bits in a register is called its width. Early computers had 8-bit registers, then 16, 32, and today, many computers have registers that are 64-bits wide. 

- As the number of memory locations grows, our addresses have to grow as well. 8 bits hold enough numbers to provide addresses for 256 bytes of our memory, but that's all. To address a gigabyte or a billion bytes of memory, we need 32-bit addresses. An important property of this memory is that we can access any memory location, at any time, and in random order. For this reason, it's called Random-Access Memory or RAM. 

- When you hear people talking about how much RAM a computer has, that's the computer's memory. RAM is like a human's short term or working memory, where you keep track of things going on right now like whether or not you had lunch or paid your phone bill.