I've just made a simple RAM memory in Minecraft (with redstone), with 4 bits for the address and 4 bits stored in each cell. Our next goal is to store different kinds of variables in it and to process them differently.
We are not engineers, so we really know nothing, but we have already made some quite complex things and we think we can do this. The problem is that we can't figure out how to store variables of more bits than can be stored in a single cell. I'll give an example.
Think of a 16-bit variable. We thought that there would be no sense in creating such big cells, so we decided to store that data by storing 4 bits in each cell. But that's not enough, we have to relate those 4 cells to each other. So we thought that we had to create 8-bit cells, with 4 bits of content and 4 bits to store the address where the next 4 bits of the variable are stored. However, 4 bits of address is nothing for a RAM memory, we can't store anything there. So we would need at least 8 bits for the address. 4 bits of content also seams quite low, and we also need at least another 4 bits to store the type of the variable.
Well, finally we thought that that technique was absurd and that it wouldn't be done like that in real life. And we don't know how to do it now. I've searched on the web about how RAM memory works and the few pages that I've found were too complex for our needs. Could someone please explain to us how this is done in real life and how we can apply it in redstone?