Continuing to piece data together, if you put two
words together, you get a double word or ???DWORD,??? which can represent values from 0
to (232 ??“ 1), or 0??“4,294,967,295 in decimal.
There are many types of computer memory; we will focus on random access memory
(RAM) and registers. Registers are special forms of memory embedded within processors,
and which will be discussed later in this chapter in the ???Registers??? section.
Random Access Memory (RAM)
In RAM, any piece of stored data can be retrieved at any time??”thus, the term ???random
access.??? However, RAM is volatile, meaning that when the computer is turned off, all data
is lost from RAM. When discussing modern Intel-based products (x86), the memory is
32-bit addressable, meaning that the address bus the processor uses to select a particular
memory address is 32 bits wide. Therefore, the most memory that can be addressed in
an x86 processor is 4,294,967,295 bytes.
Endian
As Danny Cohen summarized Swift??™s Gulliver??™s Travels in 1980:
???Gulliver finds out that there is a law, proclaimed by the grandfather of the
present ruler, requiring all citizens of Lilliput to break their eggs only at the
little ends. Of course, all those citizens who broke their eggs at the big ends
were angered by the proclamation.
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