What is asynchronous?

Answer 1

Asynchronous means that data can flow back and forth between 2 things without the transfer being linked to a timer or other method of time synchronization. An example of something that's synchronous is RAM, the system bus and processor send commands at a certain frequency (x commands per second) and the RAM must be synchronized to recieve data at these amount of times per second (frequency), or some kind of multiplier of it or there will be problems reading and writing data to the RAM. Something that is asynchronous does not need to be synchronized to any kind of frequency or clock, it can transmit and recieve data intermittently. Downloading from the internet is asynchronous due to the unreliable nature of TCP/IP over long distances.