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Article: Computer System Interfaces
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- Computer Sciences
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CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2002 The Gale Group Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Computer System Interfaces
All computer systems must possess certain elements before they can be considered useful to human users. Computers require a processing unit, some memory, perhaps secondary storage, and interconnecting
bus
networks
—
but computers also need
input/output (I/O)
devices. Computers are programmed to execute
algorithms
on data and then make the results of these computations available. If a user cannot supply data to the computer through input devices and then see how the algorithms operate on it through output devices, then the computer is ineffective.
What makes dealing with input and output devices sometimes problematic is that they differ so much in ...