Technical Computer Peripherals

In the left margin you will find links to all the computer peripheral pages to date. I plan to add more pages but have only scheduled this for the very near future with no definite date yet.

Peripherals

A peripheral is a device added to a system as a complement to the basics, such as a disk drive, tape drive, or printer. This also refers to any device attached to the outside of the computer. High speed working memory, such as RAM, ROM or, in the old days, core would not normally be referred to as peripherals. The more modern term "device" is also more general in that it is used for things such as a pseudo-tty, a RAM drive or a network adaptor.

So for those who don't know a peripheral is a device that normally requires you install a driver to operate the device. This software is supplied by the manufacturer of the peripheral device and shipped with it. Updates for most peripherals are made available on the world wide web. I have included a list of links to the more popular manufacturers as well as a list of peripherals sites. Both can be found in the left margin of the wwwlinks page.

One of the reasons that the personal computer became so popular was due to the ease at which peripherals could be moved to another computer or upgraded to a different make or model. Upgrading the computer didn't mean needing to purchase a new keyboard, mouse, monitor, drives or backup device. Before PC's gained popularity and clones were common place add-ons were bespoke to the make of system. Each popular microcomputer used their own peripherals and seldom were able to port across systems.

I personally refer to all devices connected to the computer from the ouside world as a peripheral. Simply because the peripheral usually connects to the computer through an interface which is inserted into one of the computers expansion slots, or alternatively connects to one of the existing interfaces such as the serial, usb or parallel ports. For this reason I refer to a device as connecting internally usually into one of the expansion slots.
For example, a scanner is a peripheral and is external to the computer system. The scanner can connect to the system through one of several ports. The parallel port or USB bus, which already exist as devices, usually built into the motherboard or through a SCSI interface which usually isn't built into the mainboard and is inserted into one of the expansion slots, preferably a PCI card and slot. Once the hardware is installed a driver needs to be added to the operating system. The driver primarily operates the peripheral through the device which it is connected to or interfaces with.

Anyway, the links in the left margin are technical explanations of the ins and outs of how each peripheral works. There is a section on all the internal devices such as multimedia, RAM, CPU and so on and it's simply called components.

cya in cyberspace....