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Comment by quantified | Hacker News Reader

Terabyte of mass storage, not RAM. Some call it "memory".

No one with a shred of experience calls drive space memory.

Not defending the garbage tech awareness of the writer of the article, but tons of non-english speakers do.

Cannot speak for portugese language (which is the predominant one in Brazil), but I can confirm that in russian if you say “memory” (“память”), you are talking about storage capacity. Not RAM.

I don't know what point you're trying to make here, I'm sure if you translate and reverse translate a phrase in enough languages you can get some sort of synonym back.

You think 'Lauren Smiley' doesn't speak english and auto translated this article?

> You think 'Lauren Smiley' doesn't speak english and auto translated this article?

No. But I think it could be the case that the author simply talked to the parents or the subject of the article, and then simply translated what they said in that part from portugese to english. And as a tech non-literate person, she obviously didn’t think to ask them “are you talking about storage space or RAM?”

But it's literally referred to as "secondary memory" in ye olde literature (where "primary memory" is the RAM... I wonder why the CPU cache never got a place though).

Stop the nonsense. Computer manuals from 40 years ago are not how anyone refers to things now whether they know nothing or are an expert.

CPU cache has never been sold as an independent upgrade. Wonder if a marketing study has ever been done on whether products with names that have been anthropomorphized sell better than those that have not such as random access memory vs storage. Maybe the appeal of being able to buy something illegal like human body parts or slave(s) [drive(s)] seems like it would have a cool factor for some consumers that has some how outweighed the disgust by others.

I’m fairly certain L2 caches were external (and could be purchased separately) on 486 and earlier systems

Back in the day we used to insert "memory cards" into cameras in order to store photos on them. You could transfer that memory card to a reader that was plugged into a PC and it would show up as a drive with files you could transfer to your computer's hard drive.

Personally, I usually specify RAM or hard drive/storage just to make sure I'm clear, because "memory" is pretty ambiguous in my experience.

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