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| Just about any computer that you buy for your home or office today comes
with one or more Universal Serial Bus connectors on the back. These USB
connectors let you attach everything from mice to printers to your computer
quickly and easily. The operating system supports USB as well, so the
installation of the device drivers is quick and easy too. Compared to other
ways of connecting devices to your computer (including parallel ports, serial
ports and special cards that you install inside the computer's case), USB
devices are incredibly simple! |
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| Just about every peripheral made now comes in a USB version. A sample list
of USB devices that you can buy today includes: Printers Scanners Mice
Joysticks Flight yokes Digital cameras Webcams Scientific data acquisition
devices Modems Speakers Telephones Video phones Storage devices like Zip drives
Network connections like Intel's AnyPoint home network. |
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| Connecting a USB device to a computer is simple -- you find the USB
connector on the back of your machine and plug the USB connector into it: |
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| If it is a new device, the operating system auto-detects it and asks for
the driver disk. If the device has already been installed, the computer
activates it and starts talking to it. USB devices can be connected and
disconnected at any time. |
| Many USB devices come with their own built-in cable, and the cable has an
"A" connection on it. If not, then the device has a socket on it that
accepts a USB "B" connector. |
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| The USB standard uses A and B connectors to avoid confusion. "A"
connectors head "upstream" toward the computer, while "B"
connectors head "downstream" and connect to individual devices. By
using different connectors on the upstream and downstream end, it is impossible
to ever get confused -- if you connect any USB cable's B connector into a
device, you know that it will work. Similarly, you can plug any "A"
connector into any "A" socket and you know that it will work. |
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