by Jeff Tyson and Ed Grabianowski. Essentially, a bus is a channel or path between the components in a computer, like hard disks, memory, sound systems, video systems and so on. In this article, you will learn about some of those buses. We will concentrate on the bus known as the Peripheral Component Interconnect ( PCI ). We'll talk about what PCI is, how it operates and how it is used, and we'll look into the future of bus technology.