An explicit identification of hardware, such as a memory location, peripheral device, or location within a device. For example, memory byte 107,443, disk drive 2 and sector 238 are absolute addresses. Although the action may have been initiated through many "layers of abstraction" at a higher level, some instruction in some software routine must use an absolute address to activate every hardware component in the computer. See
base address,
address mode and
abstraction layer.