Reading is an action performed by computers, to acquire data from a source and place it into their volatile storage for processing. For example, a computer may read information off a floppy disk and store it in RAM to be placed on the hard drive to be processed at a future date. Computers may read information from a variety of sources, such as magnetic storage, the Internet, or audio and video input ports.
Reading can be abstracted to one of the main functions of a Turing machine.
See also