... in sequence. When we say that the computers in the school have 16Mb (mega-bytes) of memory, it is the primary storage we are talking about. The programs you are currently running, and in most cases the data they are using (e.g. your current document in Word) are stored in the primary store. Secondary Storage: The problem with RAM is that it is volatile. This means that is the computer is switched off or the power fails, then what is currently in the memory is lost (the word volatile means "evaporates quickly"). For this reason we need another form of storage; secondary storage. Secondary storage is a permanent, non-volatile form of storage that usually involves a storage device recording the information onto some sort of physical medium. In the early days of computing, things such as punched cards, paper tape and magnetic drums were used, but modern examples are things like: * Hard discs * Floppy discs * ...

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