A cable connects equipment to a power source or other equipment. A computer has two types of buses: system and peripheral. Devices can be connected via parallel or serial buses, such as USB or FireWire®.
A cable is a thick cord or bundle of insulated wires through which electricity passes and is often used to connect equipment to a power source or to other equipment. A bus is a digital path that connects devices and resources. A computer has two main types of buses, called system buses and peripheral buses. While a system bus is an internal path between a computer’s central processing unit (CPU) and its memory, it is connected with a bus cable that the user may never see. The peripheral bus connects the computer to a peripheral, and if the user purchases a peripheral to connect, the connection will be made through a bus cable, either supplied with the peripheral or that the user must purchase.
The types of devices that can be connected to a computer via a bus cable include printers, scanners, displays, networks, recording systems, and external disks. The peripheral buses through which they are connected can be parallel buses or serial buses. The Industry Standard Architecture (AT/ISA) bus was one of the first types of parallel bus available as early as 1984. It was phased out with the development of the Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) bus, the Input-Output (I/O) bus. PCI and Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) are the parallel buses in use today, and SCSI connectors are a type of bus cable used with parallel buses.
Serial buses are typically connected to peripherals via Universal Serial Bus (USB) or FireWire®. The USB standard was first introduced in 1996 and the fact that Apple® included it on the iMac® in 1998 has increased its popularity. USB is a popular bus cable due to its plug-and-play capability, and USB 2.0 is even faster than the initial standard. FireWire® is an Apple® term for the IEEE 1394 port, but it is also known as i.LINK® and Lynx. FireWire® 400 was introduced in 1995 and FireWire® 800 in 2002. A FireWire® port is often bundled with USB 2.0 ports and is popular for external hard drives and speakers.
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