Essential Guide to Computing: The Story of Information Technology, The

Chapter 2. Memory, Storage, and Input/Output

Instructions and data, as noted in Chapter 1, enter the CPU from locations known generically as storage (recall that instructions tell the CPU where to store data). By comparison to the exotic and fast-changing CPU, storage seems relatively pedestrian, even boring. In fact, there continue to be important technological developments in storage, and the organization and characteristics of its components have a significant role in overall system performance.

The most important component of storage is memory, which is now often referred to separately from the rest of storage. Though many people think of memory as just a few chips, in fact memory has a number of distinct components and should be considered ...