WHILE ON THE SUBJECT OF RAM, I HAVE A QUESTION.
Is random access memory an amount of memory, just like normal storage, except optimized for quick access?
RAM is a storage unit meant to work at much faster speeds than storage devices like your hard drive. It achieves this by having no physical parts, using only a single transistor and a capacitor per bit of data in the case of typical dynamic RAM (DRAM). Your old fashioned hard drive uses magnetic plates to store data; this is slower than an electronic based system but it allows for greater storage density and it can retain data after power off.
At a base level, programs are stored permanently in the hard drive and are loaded into RAM by the OS. It is beneficial for program instructions to be loaded into the CPU as fast as possible so that few cycles of the CPU are wasted. Your CPU actually has a small amount of RAM (the cache) that is uses to store bits of programs that are used very frequently as the RAM on the same chip as the CPU can run at similar speeds with almost no latency.
tl;dr Yes, mostly.
