Let's move on to printers now. There are different types of printers, mainly: Blueprint, daisy wheel, dot-matrix, line printing, heat transfer, inkjet, electrophotography, laser, and solid ink. All of these printing technologies are forms of Digital Printing.Toners are usually used for digital printing. This subset of printing is also usually attributed to homes or offices, and account for 9% of the 45 Trillion pages printed around the world annually. Another up and coming printing technology is "3D Printing", which is expensive at the moment, but can create objects using whatever material instructed. This opens up many possibilities, and takes us closer to the future of Star Trek with replicators, haha.
Going back to the topic of hardware in general, for it to have a connection to a device, there must be a port for the cable to connect to. There are many different types of hardware ports. The most popular ones are: USB, Thunderbolt, and HDMI. However, there are also legacy ports, which are no longer widely used, such as: VGA, Serial, Parallel, and Firewire.
Let's start with discussing the function of legacy ports. Serial ports transfer data at one bit at a time. It has been historically used to transfer data between computers and modems and other interfaces. This type of port became outdated when the RS-232 standard was released. Parallel, in contrast, was 8-bit and had 25 pins, which is substantially more than the serial. The parallel port became standardized during the 1990s, and was seen as a predecessor to the USB. It was used for a lot of different devices, especially printers. However, when the USB came out, along with wireless printers, it was no longer commonly used. Finally, the Firewire, which is still used sometimes in today's world, was created by Apple Inc. during the mid 1990s (when Steve Jobs returned.) These cables were used because of their eye-catching data transfer speeds of up to 800 Mbits/s. However, it was destroyed by its competition USB. I guess the USB killed a lot of once popular cables. It was used in a lot of cameras towards the end of its informal death. Steve Jobs announced that Firewire was dead in 2008.
Next up, the familiar cables of the modern day! Let's start with the legendary Universal Serial Bus (USB) cable. The USB was developed in the mid-90s, and immensely simplified cable ports. Today, it is an essential cable for many devices, and it will likely be used for many more years. The latest version of the USB is USB 3.0 which has exponentially faster speeds than its predecessor, with speeds of 5 Gbits/s. The USB is able to do many things, but when it comes to video display, there is one cable which has ruled the market, and that's High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI). It should be noted that HDMI has become extremely popular in recent times, due to the massive increase in High Definition supported devices, and content. The HDMI cable is a big step-up from one of its inferiors, VGA. Then there's Thunderbolt, which is a newer technology, but not as popular. It combines the technologies of USB (in the latest release), PCI Express, and DisplayPort all in one. Developed by Intel, it has a huge transfer rate of up to 40 Gbits/s (5 GB/s), and much lower power consumption. It is seen as a potential competitor, and successor to the USB. Apple Inc. has already started using its technologies, and for good reason!
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