I was trying to explain to my friend's father the concepts of RAM and hard drives and the difference between the two. This was after my friend had confused him by telling him a "gig" was like a dollar and he had four 25 cent pieces of RAM in his computer, and then saying he wanted a 200 gig hard drive.
You can imagine the confusion.
The way I explained it was that the memory of a computer is like a desk, and the more memory you have, the bigger your desk is, and the more work space you have on it. So, with more memory, you can do more things at once. I told him that the hard drive was like a file cabinet out of which you took work to do on the desk. When you're not working, the hard drive stores all your files so that you can pull them up whenever.
And he seemed to understand.
I hate simplifying things like that, though, because I find that most people can understand what goes on without those analogies. But my friend's dad is from another generation, and computers are really foreign to him, so that's the best I could come up with. I think it worked out pretty well.
You can imagine the confusion.
The way I explained it was that the memory of a computer is like a desk, and the more memory you have, the bigger your desk is, and the more work space you have on it. So, with more memory, you can do more things at once. I told him that the hard drive was like a file cabinet out of which you took work to do on the desk. When you're not working, the hard drive stores all your files so that you can pull them up whenever.
And he seemed to understand.
I hate simplifying things like that, though, because I find that most people can understand what goes on without those analogies. But my friend's dad is from another generation, and computers are really foreign to him, so that's the best I could come up with. I think it worked out pretty well.
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