Software bus

A software bus is a software architecture model where a shared communication channel facilitates connections and communication between software modules. This makes software buses conceptually similar to the bus term used in computer hardware for interconnecting pathways.^[1]

In the early microcomputer era of the 1970s, Digital Research's operating system CP/M was often described as a software bus.^[2]^[3] Lifeboat Associates, an early distributor of CP/M and later of MS-DOS software, had a whole product line named Software Bus.^[4] D-Bus is used in many modern desktop environments to allow multiple processes to communicate with one another.

Examples

Lifeboat Associates Software Bus-80 aka SB-80, a version of CP/M-80 for 8080/Z80 8-bit computers
Lifeboat Associates Software Bus-86 aka SB-86, a version of MS-DOS for x86 16-bit computers.
Component Object Model for in-process and interprocess communication.
D-Bus for interprocess communication.
Enterprise service bus for distributed communication.

References

^ "Definition of software bus". PCMAG. Retrieved 2021-06-29.
^ Clarke, A.; Eaton, J. M.; David, D. Powys Lybbe (October 26, 1983). CP/M - the Software Bus: A Programmer's Companion. Sigma Press. ISBN 978-0905104188.
^ Johnson, Herbert R. (July 30, 2014). "CP/M and Digital Research Inc. (DRI) History".
^ Duncan, Ray (1988). The MS-DOS Encyclopedia. Microsoft Press. p. 27. Further complications arose when Lifeboat Associates agreed to help promote MS-DOS but decided to call the operating system Software Bus 86. MS-DOS thus became one of a line of trademarked Software Bus products, another of which was a product called SB-80, Lifeboat's version of CP/M-80.