Bus

A bus carries bytes of information back and forth between the hardware components of a computer system (or even between computers, if connected physically)

  • Buses are normally designed to transfer fixed-sized chunks of bytes known as words. The number of bytes in a word (word size) is a fundamental system parameter that varies across different systems.
    • ex. word size could be 4 bytes long, while others could be 8. Typically smaller systems (such as embedded controllers) have word sizes of 1 or 2.

I/O Device

  • An I/O device is the system's connection to the outside world
  • ex. keyboard and mouse for input, monitor for output, and disk drive for long-term data storage.
  • Each I/O device is connected to the I/O bus by either a controller or adapter.

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