Transcript for:
Understanding Buffers in Computing

hi this is my callahan doctor file finder and welcome to your butter shack um tutorial and what is a buffer buffer has many definitions spending computers the buffer is just an area of memory where data is stored until the computer is ready to accept it so look at keyboard buffer now whether you realize it or not you have one and you may well have seen it in action and just not realized it so I'm gonna do a graphical example here I'm gonna bring up its text editor and let's just say that while you're in it all of a sudden it freezes up so you hit Enter and I'm intentionally tapping hard so you can hear it you're hitting Enter and then you're tapping keys like what's the matter with this thing and then you hit Enter a few more times and then you hit a few more keys and nothing's happening and then all of a sudden you get this blast of stuff on your screen well what happens was that the stuff that you were entering was going into the keyboard buffer and the buffer said whoa the computer's frozen we can't go out there because it's locked up so let's just stay here in the buffer until the computer is ready so all those keystrokes and our enter enter enter enter dddd dddd all stayed in the keyboard buffer and then won the program unfroze they were all released from the buffer in one flow so that's a classic example of a buffer your printer has a buffer is used for spooling spooling is really just saying that the data to be printed is sent to a buffer area a spool so that it can be printed from there rather than having to wait and freeing up the computer to do other things in the early days of computers when you had to print you didn't do anything else so if you had a term paper that was gonna take ten hours to print you better not want to do anything else on you computer because it would spend 10 hours printing hence the creation of the print buffer every once in a while you'll see an error that says either buffer overflow or buffer overrun and that's simply a programming problem where the space that was allocated for buffering has been overrun data has burst outside of the boundaries of the buffer and it's caused the problem so a buffer is just an area of memory that holds information until the computer is ready to handle it and that's all there is to it hey this is doc if you're looking for a cheap and easy way to put your own content on the web go get domain names from hover.com just visit hover.com slash butterscotch and you'll get 10% off and support shows like these thank