How does it physically “forget” whatever coded form it held my word document in for example?
In: Technology
Computer storage is like a notebook of graph paper. Each page of the notebook has 1,000 squares in it, and you can write a single letter in each square.
You can write many documents into the notebook. To do this, you write a table of contents at the beginning, that says something like “June shopping list, pages 537-539.”
When you decide you no longer need your shopping list, you simply erase the entry for “June shopping list” in the table of contents.
The actual information in the shopping list is still there on pages 537-539, the only thing that’s immediately erased is the entry in the table of contents. But someday when you’re writing new information into the notebook, you might decide to erase and overwrite the new information into the squares on pages 537-539 that used to contain your shopping list. At that point, the shopping list is truly gone.
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