OT:why a group of signals is called a bus?

Ever ride a London two-decker? They have both.

Oh dear!

Bus lines used to be big chunky copper bars that linked power generators or transformers with other transformers, lines, and alike. Bus bars would be making the link between all the devices in a plant - any power may only be taken from or given to the bus.

Possibly, in the early computers there would have been copper bars running across all devices and all data exchanged would go only through these bars.

Yo Joe

It doesn't matter whether it's bidirectional or unidirectionional, whether it's serial or parallel. You can call it a bus, whenever you feel like it. Even an RS-232 connection could be called a bus, albeit that it does stretch the term "bus" a bit... Basically it's kinda historical, but the main point is, that the distance from device to device is limited, think in terms of the distance between chips on a pcb.

Waldemar

Tahoe Area Rapid Transit.

John

Ah! Thanks 8-)

Actually, these bars still exist in most "simple" computers, including most if not all typical embedded ones. They're called the address and data bus. They're not one-inch massive copper rods any more, obviously, but rather bundles of signal threads on a PCB, often running all 8 (or however many) of them in geometric parallel to each other. They're busses in the "distribution of something" senses because the number of devices attached to them is not limited by much else than your imagination. I also think these busses are the ones that originally caused the second meaning to creep into the field: that of a "bus" being any transport medium that carrys many signals in parallel.

Why would black people have to sit at the back?

Is this some strange US custom?

S-V

Yes, up til about the mid 60s. Look up Rosa Parks, Civil Rights.

My blonde blue-eyed mother did a reverse Rosa Parks in the early 50s. Not knowing the strange ways of the USA she sat in the wrong part of the bus. When people told her to move she said she was quite comfortable where she was and stayed put. As far as I know this one-woman protest had absolutely no impact on the civil rights movement.

Peter

CBFalconer wrote in news:416BC8EB.D9F1FD44 @yahoo.com:

That is a really interesting way of quoting the prior message, I can't fathom how your managed that unless you did it by hand.

Should have been more like:

sacre snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com (Sacre Vert) wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@posting.google.com: