Essential Guide to Computing: The Story of Information Technology, The

The I/O Bus

Computers have a number of physical paths, called buses, for moving data. An important one, the system bus, was discussed earlier in this chapter. Buses may not be very exciting, but as we try to find ways to make our computers faster, they're a critical part of the equation. Naval officers observe that the speed of a convoy is that of its slowest ship. Similarly, if a bus can't handle all the traffic that converges on it, the whole computer will have to slow down.

Tech Talk

I/O: The term input/output (I/O) refers generally to movement into and out of the computer's CPU/memory system. Since this is frequently to and from disks, it is often called disk I/O, although I/O can also refer to printers, to network connections, etc.

As noted, ...