The computer world is often accused of being mired in jargon and I think that is a fair criticism. In some ways it gets worse when an everyday word is “hijacked” to have a new meaning. A good example is “program”, which had several meanings before it was applied to software. Interestingly, in the UK we use the US spelling (“program”) to refer to software, but retain the English version (“programme”) for everything else.

Another re-purposed word is “memory”, which is interesting because it has acquired a number of meanings in a computing context. Historically, the term referred to the place that a program and data resided during execution – it still does have this meaning. But it was also used to refer to bulk storage like disk drives. Even today, when someone tells me how much memory their PC has, I have to make sure that they are not telling me about disk storage. For embedded systems, memory has always been a term with a number of meanings … (more…)