ABSTRACT
Most of the devices with which the processor interacts are on the motherboard, a term used to refer to the circuit board on which the processor is mounted. Most of the devices with which the processor directly communicates can be classified as either memory devices or peripheral devices. The Bus connection strategy has the advantage of creating a simple communication topology. The disadvantage is that, only a single pair of devices can communicate at a particular time. A memory unit is a collection of storage devices called words. Each word is capable of storing a multi-bit value. The equipment to print Read Only Memory (ROM) chips is a financial investment that only large-scale production houses would want to make. PROM chips are programmable. The meaning of programmable, however, is a bit different than what a computer scientist would think of.
