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Input and Output (more)
Even more input and output
By: David K. Every
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Article
2002-03-11 07:36:08
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 he last article explained that I/O (Input/Output) is how you get information into and out of your computer. The sheer variety of connectors and cables confuses people.
Most of the confusion in computers and I/O is because the staggering speed of change and evolution. We're learning and improving things so fast, that computers, and all the adaptors and connectors have to adapt to keep up. And while we are in transition, we often have both old style connectors and newer (better) ones, so that people can use their old devices and newer ones together. (Saving them from having to replace everything at once). Eventually the old ones are replaced and will die out; but during that transition, there's a lot more to know. And since we keep adding new ones, it stays confusing.
For example; we used to have these old style serial or parallel ports. One device (usually the computer) could talk to one other device (a "peripheral") through the cable/connector, at low speed. If you needed more devices, you had to add more ports. This was bulky and confusing, and the back of your computer looked like an octopus and had to have all these ports for all these devices.
To solve that problem, we created newer "bus" style I/O like USB or 1394 FireWire (called iLink in Sony lingo); this is where many devices can all share the same connectors and cables. These newer connectors are much faster than the older style ones, and all devices can connect to each other and share fewer connectors to the computer. So you can plug a drive into a scanner into a printer and then finally into the computer; instead of each of them requiring their own separate port. This makes cabling things up easier, less expensive and more reliable. On top of that, both USB and FireWire can supply power to some lower-power devices, meaning they don't even need a separate power cable.
For a while, we have computer with both old style and new style connectors. But even now, we're evolving away from the older style connectors, which will make life much easier.
But progress marches forward. Not only do you have USB or FireWire devices, but they have different versions of each like USB 1.0, 1.1 or 2.0, or FireWire in 100, 400, 800 or soon 1600 speeds. Or another connector that is adapting fast is your network connector (Ethernet port). It has many speed variants like 10 million bits per second (10T), 100 million bits (100T), 1,000 million bits or a billion bits (1GB) and they're working on 10,000 million bits (10GB). So all these numbers and names get thrown around to confuse people; but things aren't as hard as they seem. For the most part, even though each new version allows higher and higher speed; they are still "compatible" with older versions of that same connector; so you can plug an old device into a new one, and vise versa; they just have to talk at the lower (older) speed. This isn't great (because you'd like the higher speed), but at least it works.
Don't let the jargon scare you. All these I/O ports have different names and numbers and speeds; but this isn't much more complex than things you already know, like your house; which has the same concepts. Water, Electricity and Gas come in, and sewage goes out. Phone and cable come in and out, and some things like electricity have multiple versions (110 or 220). If you can understand this for your house, then you can easily learn the same stuff about your computer. 
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