QUESTION 3:
When they are running, are machine langage programs in main memory along with data?
I would guess about 100,000 operations. Certainly not as few as 100 or less. All these small opertions add up to a useful big operation: displaying a new Web page.
Users and programmers of computers usually don't think about the millions of tiny electronic operations that go on each second. The situation is (very roughly) similar to when you are driving your car. You think about the "big operations" it can perform, such as "accelerate", "turn left", "brake", and so on. You don't think about the valves in your engine opening and closing 24,000 times per minute.
Each tiny electronic operations that a processor can perform is called a machine operation. A processor (a "machine") performs these one at a time, but millions of them in a second.
A machine instruction consists of several bytes in memory that tells the processor to perform one machine operation. The processor looks at machine instructions in main memory one after another, and performs one machine operation for each machine instruction. The collection of machine instructions in main memory is called a machine language program or (more commonly) an executable program.
Don't panic if the above seems incomprehensible. It takes some getting used to. (And to really understand it all takes several courses.)
When they are running, are machine langage programs in main memory along with data?