Suppose the RAM for a certain computer has 256M words, where each word is 16 bits long. What is the capacity of the memory expressed in bytes

The RAM capacity expressed in bytes is

512 million bytes

Explanation:

a) Data and Calculations:

RAM contains 256m words

Each word = 16 bits

1 bit = 0.125 byte

This means that each word will have 2 (16 * 0.125) bytes

Therefore, the RAM contains 256m * 2 = 512 million bytes

b) A bit is 0.125 bytes and a byte is eight times bigger than a bit.  This implies that there are eight megabits in every megabyte, and one gigabyte is eight times bigger than one gigabit.  The 512 million bytes above are about 488.3 gigabytes, since 1 gigabyte equals 1,024 megabytes or 1,046,576 kilobytes.