[mcny]

Even today I don't fully understand what a bus really is. I mean I sort of get that it is one or more (copper?) wires that carry information as electricity somehow but at no point do I remember anyone saying this explicitly in any of my education.

I've had to piece this information together in my head from multiple conversations. So now when I hear the word bus, I think a ribbon cable. Each of those cables can only send two states, high and low current and that's how I think of a bus because anything more advanced isn't something I can intuitively process at all.

So I'll just nod and smile when people talk about bus and I don't understand a thing.

[layer8]

I mean, you could read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_(computing) or one of the first Google hits for “hardware bus”: https://www.computerhope.com/jargon/b/bus.htm

You can’t expect to learn stuff like this just from random conversations.