|
Laptop connectors
The Universal Serial Bus
USB is short for Universal Serial Bus, and refers to a standard originally developed by Intel for connecting external devices to computers.
Forget about printer ports, forget about serial ports, and forget about keyboard and mouse ports. Any type of device you could have plugged into these other ports you can now plug into a USB port.
Most laptops have only one or two USB ports. If you need to connect three USB devices at the same time, there’s no problem: one of the many qualities of USB is that it’s expandable through USB hubs. A USB hub is a simple little device that has one connector to fit into your USB port, and then typically two, four or even eight USB ports of its own.
Add the right hub and you can easily connect as many as eight devices to the same port. In fact, technically speaking, you can connect up to 127 devices to a single USB port, but that’s not very likely for most users.
FireWire
At about the same time that Intel came up with USB, Apple developed a somewhat competing technology called FireWire.
Why somewhat? Although both of these were designed to provide a standardized means for connecting external devices, they were aimed at different markets.
With its 12-Mbps throughput, USB 1.1 was suitable for mice, keyboards, printers, etc.
However, with its impressive 400-Mbps throughput, FireWire was the connection medium of choice for high-end applications, such as connecting external devices used in digital video editing.
Then along came USB 2.0 with its 480-Mbps throughout. For technical reasons, the original FireWire is still considered by many to be superior to USB 2.0.
| 
