DEV Community

Discussion on: Explain "memory" like I'm five

Collapse
 
practicingdev profile image
Practicing Developer • Edited

It's a big sheet of paper with a number on each line.

You can write anything you want on each line but are limited to whatever can fit in that fixed amount of space. You can also erase whatever is on the line and replace it with something else later if you want.

You can look stuff up later by number, making it so that you don't need to remember everything that was written on each line, just which line(s) to find it on.

You can make all sorts of neat things happen if you come up with special rules that tell you which lines to look at or change the contents of in which order, and can even place those instructions in memory so that they can make changes to the rules themselves.

From there, it gets pretty complicated. 😄