Abstract: A computer system includes a computing device such as a microcontroller and a memory device. The memory device is illustrtively a serial device connected to the serail port of the microcontrollerThe memory device includes a page latch load circuit which provides serial I/O to the microcontroller and transfers I/O bits in a predetermined order to/from the page latches. Page latches are connected over many bit lines to a memory cell array. The page latches not only supports programming and reading of sectors in the memory cell array, but also provides one or more of the following functions: directly accessable to the microcontroller as an SRAM scratch pad, directly loadable from the memory cell array to facilitate single byte "read-modify-write" operations, and loadable during programming operations to support real time applications.