Just curious about it, but can’t understand why is it like that.
In: 7
OK, think of how we looked up information before computers.
You have questions and the encyclopedia at the library has answers. An encyclopedia can come in 22 volumes, each a separately bound book.
You have checked out volume “A” which contains all encyclopedia topics that start with the letter “A” and brought it back home.
(I’ll put the computer analogy in parentheses.)
You open the book
(start the program which loads the book contents from disk into RAM)
to an article about Aardvarks. You read that page.
(This is like reading data in the CPU L1 cache.)
The article continues, so you turn the page.
(This is like reading a page of data from the CPU L2 cache.)
But now you are curious about anteaters. So you go to the index and look up which page starts the anteater topic (page 328) and you turn to that page.
(This is like reading from RAM. The more RAM, the more pages you can have in the book.)
Anteaters are interesting, but **pangolins are cool**.
Except you don’t have encyclopedia volume “P” at home. So you go to the library to return volume “A” and ask to check out volume “P”.
(This is like getting data from disk. A bigger disk can store a bigger library of books.)
Except the librarian tells you that volume “P” is already checked out to Chad. You now have to wait until Chad returns that book before you can check it out and read it yourself. That might take a while.
***Chad!***
(This is like downloading data from the Internet where the request comes from your computer, to the ISP and on to some server, and the resulting data is sent by the server to your ISP and on to your computer.)
Knowing about pangolins is worth the wait. But if you had ~~more RAM~~ a giant encyclopedia, you could have had all topics in one volume and been learning about pangolins right now.
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