BUS

=Bus= A bus is basically a highway that is used to transport data. Before buses, pathways were used instead. The downside of pathways is that connecting a series of computer components takes a lot more pathways because each component needs to be connected to every other one. When a bus is being used, every component connects itself to a bus alone. See picture #1. A bus can carry a certain amount of bits. The **width** of a bus is the term used to explain how many bits are able to be carried simultaneously. There are three types of buses. Internal **Expansion Buses,** internal **Motherboard Buses,** and external **Cable Buses.** Expansion buses are inside the computer and are card slots for graphic cards, sound cards, TV-cards, etc. Motherboard buses are inside the computer and are on the motherboard. They connect different components of the motherboard such as the CPU to the RAM or an on-board video or audio chip to the monitor or speaker. The third type of bus, cable buses, are in every cable that is not on the motherboard. If you were to connect an external HDD, you would connect it with a cable. In the cables are buses that bring bits, or information, from the HDD to the computer. An iPod USB cable transfers songs from the computer onto buses and into you iPod. But there are also cable buses inside the computer. The IDE ribbon cable is a form of a bus that connects the HDD to the motherboard.See Picture #2

Author: Thomas Ambrosia Editor: Joelle Cheng