Description

If you're working with computers for any length of time, you're going to hear the term "bus". No, they're not talking about the big, yellow thing that takes kids to school. It's a means for different components in your computer to send and receive information. Michael "Doctor File Finder" Callahan explains.

Transcript

Hi, this is Mike Callahan, Doctor File Finder and welcome to your butterscotch.com tutorial. And what is a bus? Yes this big yellow thing is a bus. But in this case, we’re talking about a computer bus. Got a little diagram here and this red line represents the bus. Now, bus in your computer is a physical connection, not something continuous like a port. Bus is a physical connection made up of cables and circuits and it shared by all the devices on your computer that are connected to your computer so they can communicate together. Only the device that the information is intended pays any attention to it. So this item can drop information on the bus and it can travel along and get picked up here. You can drop stuff on the bus and can be picked up here or here or here. So what buses do is cut down on the number of paths that data has to be routed to and route it to a single channel. When you heard the term 32-bit bus, it’s referring to the amount of data that the bus can carry. So now the big thing is 64-bit bus. That means you can carry twice as much data at a given time than the 32-bit bus. So that’s a bus. It’s a physical thing in your computer. There’s more than one. We will cover that in another time. And that’s all there is to it.