Talk:Computer memory

Computers are not all electronic - they can be mechanical or fluidic. Electronic computers are not all digital, they can be analog. Digital electronic computers do not have to use binary, they have in the past used decimal arithmetic, and other bases are possible e.g. base 3. It's just easier to make binary logic gates, and particularly binary memory. Most computers now use UTF-8 to represent both English and most other languages, not ASCII (which is a subset of UTF-8). I was going to say that computers do not use bytes because ASCII used 8 bits, it's the other way around. But I realize that may in fact be true. Memory is allocated in powers of two because N address lines create 2**N addresses, so storage chips will have 64,128,512 etc. bit capacities and computer registers which address these will also naturally be a power of 2 wide (4, 8, 16 etc.). Computers tend to have had a multiple of 8 as the wordlength (8, 16, 24, 32 etc.) and although word-addressed memory was common at one time, byte-addressable memory became common as ASCII suspseded earlier text coding methods such as EBCDIC and programmers started to write text-processing programs as well as numerical ones and wanted quick access to character data. Adaviel (talk) 05:52, 14 January 2013 (UTC)