Week 1: Day 02 - Input/Output #2

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 This type of port became outdated when the RS-232 standard was released.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!

Week 1: Day 01 - Input/Output #1

Hello everyone! This is my first substantive blog post. Today, we'll cover some input/output terms and technologies. Most of it will concern hardware, to no surprise.

To begin, we should first start by defining what hardware is. In my words, hardware means -- a large variety of physical technologies that have functions. But that's not the only definition, since context is a huge part of it. When it comes to computers, technologies go eons beyond the conventional "simple machine". My definition with context to computers would be -- a series of technologies which perform functions within a computer system, especially running software. Here is a dictionary definition: "The mechanical, magnetic, electronic, and electrical devices comprising a computer system, as the CPU, disk drives, keyboard, or screen."

Let's move on to computer resolutions and monitors. When it comes to monitors, phones, or even TVs, you can configure your system to display a variety of resolutions (excluding phones). However each screen has a different maximum resolution. Some of the popular maximum resolutions that are used, fall under a commonly used name, "High Definition", or simply "HD". The resolutions which fall under this category are "1280x720" or "1920x1080", More often than not, you'll hear them referred to as "720p" or "1080p". The latter is the most common superior resolution around, aside from 2k which is becoming more common for televisions. What does the "p" and "i" mean? The "p" stands for "progressive", while "i" is interlaced. Progressive is better, since there are more pixels, making the image a lot smoother. However, what if you don't have a screen which can support such a high resolution? Well this is a reality for many people, and when it comes to televisions it comes in either 480i (SD) or 480p (ED). With computer screens, there is a larger variety of screen resolutions, so much that it isn't worth mentioning. Despite that, it should be made clear that there are several types of  monitors. The Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) was a television/monitor that was commonly used back in the day. This has since changed to newer technologies such as Light Crystal Display (LCD) and Light Emitting Diodes (LED). LCDs and LEDs are very similar, except LCDs use a special back lighting technique.

Another technology that's commonly used for input/output functions are keyboards! It's pretty obvious how a keyboard works. You click a key, and it will perform a function on your machine. Some important shortcuts to note are Ctrl-C (Copy) or Ctrl-V (Paste), and Ctrl-Alt-Delete to bring up a task window. These devices are used for word processing, and to play games. Speaking about games, other types of input devices are gamepads, a mouse, joystick, touchpad, etc. Each one of these are used for interaction between a human and their computer. For example, if I click on an icon with my cursor, I would use a mouse. The computer processes this and executes the click. I feel like I'm explaining obvious things at this point, so that's it for my blog today! Until next time.

Welcome to this blog!

Hello to any potential readers! Today, I am making a brand new blog, which will follow one of my courses at NOVA, where I am dual-enrolled. I encourage you to read this blog, if you're interested in the field of IT, and even more particularly, computer applications and concepts. This class will be about a semester long, but I'm pretty sure I'll get through all the objectives before the end.