Like many computer geeks, I tend to be a stickler for the right terminology. For example, I can never let it go when someone refers to a computer case as the "CPU" of the computer. Pedantic? Maybe. But there are some hills I just have to die on for some reason.
When it comes to people who use the term "memory" when they mean storage, that's something I don't bother with anymore. Not only does it seem futile, it might not really be a distinction worth making in the long run.
The mistake is older than most of the people making it
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The first computers I encountered in my life didn't have any built-in storage. There was RAM, but all you got were two floppy drives. One had the operating system, and the other had the software you wanted to run. Incidentally, this is why your OS hard drive on DOS or Windows is the C: drive. Drives A: and B: are these two drives, but Drive B: fell out of use.
Going back before my time, when secondary storage was punch cards, or tape, it's the "memory" that was a permanent part of the machine. All other storage was external and temporary. By the time internal hard drives were normal for computers, I doubt people bothered to make the distinction. Not that I'm arguing this is why people mix the two concepts up today, but that I've been correcting this mistake since the '90s when I was a literal child.
Game consoles and memory cards made the confusion worse
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It doesn't help that other computer-adjacent products played fast and loose with the term "memory." I'm thinking specifically of the PlayStation and later the PlayStation 2. Together these are some of the best-selling consoles of all time, and they both referred to their storage cards as "memory cards" even though they were just solid state memory to save files to. So, if you asked someone how much memory their PlayStation had, they'd probably tell you "8MB" because that's what it said on Sony's card. It also didn't help that Nintendo actually sold a RAM upgrade for its N64 console, called the "Expansion Pak."
I've definitely heard this for every console generation with an internal hard drive since too. People have told me "my PlayStation 3 has 80GB of memory," which made my eye twitch at the time, but people are still telling me their PlayStation 5's have 1TB of memory today. So it seems easier just to go with the flow.
Flash storage blurred the technical distinction even more
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Maybe I shouldn't give Sony too much flack for calling them memory cards though, because when it comes to solid state storage in SD cards, USB thumb drives, and, of course, modern SSDs, they are actually a form of computer memory. The only real practical difference between flash memory and RAM is performance, latency, and volatility.
At a fundamental level, however, flash memory is rightfully computer memory in a way that a mechanical hard disk or an optical disc isn't. In fact, there are now SSDs that are faster than some types of RAM in certain areas, and don't forget that the much-hyped memristor was once going to unify RAM and SSDs into a single technology. That might still happen at some point, and then the word really won't mean what it does today.
The technical distinction matters less to most people than you think
RAM and storage are very different. One is a high-performance working space that allows our CPUs and GPUs to stay fed with data so they can perform at their best, and not twiddle those virtual thumbs as they wait for the next instruction. Mixing them up has real consequences when buying a new computer or other device.
My own parents have often thought that when their computers say "your computer is out of memory" it meant that they needed to free up hard drive space. It turns out they were still running on 4GB of RAM. Don't worry, I took care of that problem.
But the potential for costly mistakes doesn't stop there. Devices like tablets and smartphones rarely even bother to advertise how much RAM they have. So people think that if they have a 1TB phone it means the phone has 1TB of "memory." But since they generally know that this is storage does it matter that much?
It can be an issue when you're looking at the required specs for software you want to run too, but in the end how much does the average person care about these semantics? I'll keep making the distinction myself, but I'll only correct people when it's really necessary. Perhaps when there's a financial or technical risk involved. The rest of the time it's probably better to just smile and nod.
