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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