https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Technology In many ways, our memories make us who we are, helping us remember our past, learn and retain skills, and plan for the future. And for the computers that often act as extensions of ourselves, memory plays much the same role, whether it’s a two-hour movie, a two-word text file, or the instructions for opening either, everything in a computer’s memory takes the form of primary units called bits, or binary digits. The 1s and 0s Each of these is stored in a memory cell that can switch between two states for two possible values, 0 and 1 . Files and programs consist of millions of these bits, all processed in the central processing unit, or CPU, that acts as the computer’s brain. And as the number of bits needing to be processed grows exponentially, computer designers face a constant struggle between size, cost, and speed. Like us, computers have short-term memory for immediate tasks and long-term memory for more permanent storage. When you run a program,