Memory in which information can be referred to in an arbitrary or random order. As an analogy, a book is a random-access storage device in that it can be opened and read at any point. RAM usually means the part of memory available for programs from a disk; the programs and other data are lost when the computer is turned off. A computer with 512K RAM has 512 kilobytes available to the user. (Technically, the read-only memory (ROM) is also random access, and what’s called RAM should correctly be termed read-write memory.) Compare read-only memory, read-write memory.
