78 ◾ Information Systems: What Every Business Student Needs to Know
e trend is for computers to require, and have, more RAM. is trend is driven by the
demands of increasingly complex soware and users’ desire to have more programs run-
ning at a time and is supported by steadily decreasing RAM prices. A RAM capacity of
2 GB, marginal for personal computers in 2015, would have been ample veyears ago. It
may be impractically small in 2020.
You may hear that RAM is volatile: when you remove its electrical power, its contents
are lost. Most RAM technologies today are volatile, but that’s not a basic principle. Using
volatile RAM is a technology choice that computer designers make at a particular time.
ere were times when nonvolatile R