RAM, or Random Access Memory, is your PC's "chalkboard" or workspace. Essentially, RAM is nothing more than a "box of switches" that are either on or off. Each switch stores a bit. It takes 8 switches or bits to represent a character. 1 character = 1 byte.

Ram is measured in bytes. The approximate equivalents of the "byte units of measure." are listed below:
kilobyte (1K)one thousand bytes
megabyte (1MB)one million bytes
gigabyte (1GB)one billion bytes

PCs today require much more RAM than older PCs. That's because today's software requires much more storage space than older PCs. 16-32MB is not uncommon. Compare that to the 640K of the first PCs!