The following sections of this BookRags Literature Study Guide is offprint from Gale's For Students Series: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Works: Introduction, Author Biography, Plot Summary, Characters, Themes, Style, Historical Context, Critical Overview, Criticism and Critical Essays, Media Adaptations, Topics for Further Study, Compare & Contrast, What Do I Read Next?, For Further Study, and Sources.
(c)1998-2002; (c)2002 by Gale. Gale is an imprint of The Gale Group, Inc., a division of Thomson Learning, Inc. Gale and Design and Thomson Learning are trademarks used herein under license.
The following sections, if they exist, are offprint from Beacham's Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction: "Social Concerns", "Thematic Overview", "Techniques", "Literary Precedents", "Key Questions", "Related Titles", "Adaptations", "Related Web Sites". (c)1994-2005, by Walton Beacham.
The following sections, if they exist, are offprint from Beacham's Guide to Literature for Young Adults: "About the Author", "Overview", "Setting", "Literary Qualities", "Social Sensitivity", "Topics for Discussion", "Ideas for Reports and Papers". (c)1994-2005, by Walton Beacham.
All other sections in this Literature Study Guide are owned and copyrighted by BookRags, Inc.
Any computer memory unit may be idealized as (because it behaves as) a large collection of registers, each of which holds a single binary word N bits in length. Only one of these registers is connected to the outside world (i.e., the rest of the computer) at any given moment. While a register is so connected, its contents may either be read out or written over. All the vast, high-speed information flows to and from memory that computer users take for granted consist of this simple procedure repeated millions of times per second.
The binary string that tells a memory unit which internal register to connect to the "outside world" is the address of that location. A register that contains such an address and communicates it to the memory is an address register. Since memories of several sorts appear throughout any computer--from scratchpad memory in the central processing unit, to random-access memory chips, to peripheral bulk-storage devices such as disk drives and CD-ROMs--any given computer contains many address registers, all serving the same basic function for their respective memories.
Since a memory containing (say) 2M words of data requires 2M distinct addresses, an M-bit address register is required for addressing the data such a memory. Or to put it the other way around, an M-bit address suffices for addressing a memory containing not more than (but possibly less than) 2M distinct data items.