How have storage units evolved over time in computers?
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Associated with the central processing unit is the storage unit, or memory, where results or other data are stored for periods of time ranging from a small fraction of a second to days or weeks before being retrieved for further processing. Once made up of vacuum tubes and later of small doughnut-shaped ferromagnetic cores strung on a wire matrix, main storage now consists of integrated circuits , each of which contains thousands of semiconductor devices. Where each vacuum tube or core represented one bit and the total memory of the computer was measured in thousands of bytes (or kilobytes, KB), each semiconductor device now represents millions of bytes (or megabytes, MB) and the total memory of mainframe computers is measured in billions of bytes (or gigabytes, GB).
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