BCS Glossary of Computing, 14th Edition

E3 MEMORY

Memory is the part of a computer system that stores the data for use by the processors. This data is made up of program files and data files for use by the programs. Generally there are three categories of memory each defined by the purpose it serves:

• The holding of programs and data that the processor needs immediately – for this reason it is sometimes known as immediate-access memory.
• The holding of programs and data that may be needed sometime later – often called backing store.
• In order to gain access to documents, data, etc. wherever the user may be, there is the cloud as backing store.

Most processor operations involve the movement of data around the immediate-access memory, so it is necessary to read from and to write to ...