A short introduction to RAM As an engineering major, it's rather important for us to know how to write a semi-technical introduction that's readable to the general public. Here is my little essay. I would greatly appreciate it if someone could correct the mistakes :) RAM is the shorthand for "Random Access Memory", which consists the fastest human accessible memory of the computer. In a computer, there are many huge memory blocks embedded in its hard drives.But RAM blocks, in contrast, are much smaller and commonly built in the CPU of the computer. Its major role is to store the most "useful" data in convenient positions for the computer to access. So in some sense RAM is like the warehouses along the interstate highways. Generally speaking, a bigger RAM storage space can hugely increase the computer's performance.