What Is Base Address?
You use a base address to find something in a place that's not your home. Let's say you're looking for your cousin who lives down the street. You need to know where she lives before finding her, right? The same is valid for computers. When you want to know where something else is, you first get a base address for yourself and then ask for a lesson from the other thing. The base address can be anywhere—in your house, street, or even another country! It just needs to be easy for everyone to find when looking for it. A base address is a reference point for other addresses in computing. The base address is used as a relative address for instructions within a program or as a location for data being processed. The hardware/software interface may determine whether the base address is accessible or addressable. In the early days, computers were like old-fashioned cars: they were all stick shifts. That's right—no automatic transmission. And no power steering, either. Just a big engine with a single-gear lever to get you from zero to 60 mph as quickly as possible. (Okay, not that fast. ) In those days, there was no universal remote control or even an automatic door opener—you had to do everything yourself! And if someone wanted to drive your car for you? Forget about it; that would never happen! But then came virtual memory and the modern operating system, which allowed multiple programs to run simultaneously on one computer. Suddenly people could use their cars for work and play simultaneously! But this posed a problem: how could the computer tell which program was running when it needed instructions or data from another program? The answer was simple: base addresses. The earliest computers had limited memory and could only run one program simultaneously; base addresses go back to those days. These machines always loaded programs into fixed and limited memory.
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